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Alex is talking about how 0.01% top-tier talent works… but he’s wrong about not being able to understand them. When I was in grade school, we had no money and lived in the Bronx but my Dad wanted us to get a top education. So he bought an abandoned house in the best school district in America. We happened to move across the street from a kid my age who now is one of the 1% top physicists in the world. We grew up together. My dad graduated from Cornell Medical School and had an IQ far to the right of the distribution curve, but this kid was somewhere on the tail. Just listening to the conversations they would have was mind-opening. Much of my academic success was just trying to keep up with this guy. He’s probably a big reason why I became a ship captain too because we were on the sailing team together & he always kicked my ass. No matter how much I tried to outperform him on the physical side, he would calculate some changing wind angle or currents & blow past me. The best of the best truly do think differently. Spending so much time with him gave me three major advantages in life: I can’t outthink them, but I was able to learn how they think and operate. Put me in a room with these people & I can follow along. People like this are not telepathic, they are limited by the same words the rest of us are. They have to slow their brains down to communicate with each other. Get in a room with a few true geniuses, and you’ll feel like listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown… but learn your vocabulary words and understand how they think & you can follow along. Second, after a few years, you will be able to understand many of the ways they think through problems. It’s radically different than the rest of us, but over time, you’ll pick up new ways of looking at the world. Geniuses have a massive toolbox of ways to think through problems. If you spend enough time with them, then you start to pick up individual tools. Now you can never compete fully because they can operate the tools faster and, more importantly, know what tools to use in various situations while you’re stuck trying each one… but there is real value in having them. Finally, and most importantly, you can recognize genius when you see it. It’s incredibly rare, but every few months you’ll spot someone truly gifted. Help them out and become friends with them & you have true talent on speed dial. I love understanding geopolitical complexity in situations like the Strait of Hormuz today. I think grok can tell you my predictions have been more accurate than most. How did I do that? Well, I worked through several problem sets, then when I reached my intellectual capacity, I called a genius. So how can this help you? Well, there is a trick. The most valuable resource in the world isn’t brain power or money… it’s time. Another valuable resource is friendship. Geniuses need friends & people who can help them compress time. For example, I have one friend I volunteered for years to drive him to the airport. I saved him having to spend time figuring out parking or worrying about a taxi. I got an hour each way getting access to his brain. But to do that, you have to recognize & understand genius first. There are two ways: Get a low-level job somewhere that hires geniuses. It doesn’t matter if you fetch coffee or manage the printer. You’re there to learn. Second is to get access to their classrooms and workshops. I was CTO of a startup at MIT. It sounds more impressive than it was, but the best part of the job was access to MIT lectures. I’d walk into subjects and just listen. Often I’d arrive late because what I wanted was not the lecture information but rather the chance to listen into the discussion after. My son does this now with the rocket club @ERAU_Daytona. Has he contributed a new rocket motor fuel design? No, but he helps lift the rockets & such, which lets him be a fly on the wall when the literal rock scientists work through problems.