I enjoyed reading that. It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke

I enjoyed reading that. It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers. I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad. I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise. Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even. I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences. So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should! The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back. When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.