Intelligence is a myth but Stupidy is real

I don’t think there’s such thing as smart people.

You can be good at sales, you can be well read, you can know history. I don’t think I’ve met anyone is knows a lot about more than about 2 things. It doesn’t transfer well.

There is no real intelligence. Nobody is really an expert. At least, not to the level you expect them too. Much of it is marketing and posturing. That’s why arrogance in general is so ridiculous.

Believing in genius gives us an excuse for being lazy.

If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it’s not our fault if we can’t do something as good.

Intelligence is what people who don’t ever try anything tell themselves they have.

Is there smart money from investors? Those who do, invest.

Entrepreneurs jump at the chance of taking money for 10% equity and then spend 8 months debating an employee who gets 2%.

History shows time and time again that people who are good at one thing are not good at everything when they first try. People get good at things by being really bad at them for a long time.

This is true of everything from your friends high school who just “somehow know how to play piano amazingly to your one friend who somehow just picks up on new languages easily.

They all spent a lot of time practicing it. Sometimes it’s unintentional practice.

From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla

These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:

1. Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
2. The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

Corollary: a stupid person is more dangerous than a pillager.

We all picture leaving our day jobs to work on something meaningful. Something amazing.
Robert Frost, the most famous poet, worked in a light-bulb factory when he wrote his poems. He was never able to do it full time.
Einstein worked at the patent office and raised a kid when he wrote his relativity theories.