Over the weekend I was asked this question by a family friend (friend of parents);

You and your brother are obviously very intelligent people, how do you relate to other people who aren’t as intelligent as you.

This was interesting for a number of reasons, the family, if I recall correctly, the father was a medical doctor and they had a daughter (a few years younger than me) who was starting her journey in the medical profession - clearly from another very intelligent family.

In hindsight I don’t think this is an issue that we think enough about. By some coincidence this article came out at roughly the same time: Ingenious: David Krakauer, where he explains what is genius, what is intelligence. To summarise some of his interview and do him a complete disservice, intelligence can be expressed as finding a simple solution to a complex problem, whilst genius is when you can make a problem go away, normally by showing people that there is a completely superior way of doing things which can not even be rationally disputed.

I find conversations and thoughts like these fascinating. Within primary school I was the smartest student, earning title “dux” of the school within my primary school (year 6). Consequently I attended a selective school for the academically gifted, and it could be described as one of the most humbling experiences in my life. I went from best the undisputed best to merely average.

How did your son do in his Maths exam?

Having asian descent grants you one thing. You’re parents will talk and inevitable compare you with others. I was fortunate enough to have a mother who stopped doing this; instead encouraging me to always perform at my best, a trait of relentlessness which has carried me through.

It was in my first year of high school (in Australia, High school is from year 7-12), where I was sitting an exam in my strongest subject, mathematics. I remember getting quite a shock within that exam, it was difficult and I didn’t quite have enough time to finish. An experience which I never really had before. The results came back and I earned high 60s out of a total possible score of 120. This score alone pushed me to the top quartile of the grade. But what was surprising was the range of scores within the cohort, ranged from single digits all the way to 119.5/120.

It was probably after hearing this, my mother realised there was little value in comparing me with her friends' children’s math scores. The maths exams were probably not comparable.

Despite being academically gifted the gap between me and the ones at the top was massive.

I went from being the smartest student, to a fairly mediocre one simply by being placed in a similar environment.

This reshuffle or order would happen again when I went to university and then in the workplace. Neither which shocked me the way entering high school did. But this was a constant reminder of intelligence. It is all relative.

If you are an actuary within a workplace where no one is an actuary then you could be considered special, but when you move to a team where one in three have PhDs and everyone else is an actuary, then you’re not that special anymore.

What is success?

Everyone quantifies success in their own way. Increasingly it feels like an obsession, a relentless throng which can never really ends. Where instead of the character trait of tenancity and strong resolve instead becomes knowing when to give up.

An architect once described to me that success is like a drug. The success piles up, and you increasingly need more and more of it, to fulfil that high. Just make sure you don’t come crashing down.

And I suppose the sentiment was shared by ESR when he replied to Linus during development of Linux:

Some of us were those kids in college. We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due – the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your native talent alone doesn’t cut it any more. The smarter you are, the longer it takes to hit that crunch point – and the harder the adjustment when you finally do. And we can see that you, poor damn genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising.

Perhaps allowing yourself to crash and burn is a good one. And the only way to let yourself pull yourself back up.