I perform well in areas I have interests in. Thus, by coincidence, I can appear capable in those areas. I’m also shockingly stupid in other areas. I’ve noticed a few things about how I learn: it has to be practical. Nothing theoretical will stick, unless put into practice. Thus, school was hell. I am also a devilish combination of a very slow learner who thinks differently about things. When a teacher taught things to the class, everyone got it immediately and I always somehow managed to come up with my own, weird, wrong interpretation of things. Once I have finally learned something, I am very accurate and precise, which is fairly useful in the fields I’ve worked in. I also have a flexible mind, which is great. I can usually reason outside of the confines most people think within. Which, see school, can be a blessing or a curse.

I’ve met truly intelligent people. Like, real freaks of nature types. PhDs in aerospace engineering, that sort of thing. Their universal intelligence is something else. It has shown and demonstrated to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are levels of comprehension, both in the uptake and subsequent processing of almost any information, that I will never reach.

But don’t for a minute think that these were happy people.

I appear incredibly smart when I get to flash my surface level knowledge about a, quite frankly, impressively broad spectrum of topics. But I always feel dumb as hell when people who really know their stuff about some stuff talk about the stuff they know so much about.

I have a typical smart people career, and my coworkers are pretty smart too. I therefore like to believe that I’m at least somewhat smart… but there’s too much evidence to the contrary.