What’s the importance of intelligence, in the long run? Does it correlate with success?

It depends on your definition of success. When Camilla Benbow and her husband, David Lubinski, tracked the top scorers from the gifted camps, they found that the very cream of the cream tended to become physicists, those in the middle gravitated toward medicine, and those at the bottom became lawyers and businessmen. If they had looked at their salaries, though, I suspect that the order would have been reversed: the businessmen and lawyers would have come out on top, the physicists on the bottom. Intelligence is a wonderful asset for any career, but the life of the mind has never been all that well paid.

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This is bad news for me since I want to be a physicist.