I know what you’re thinking. That there are people out there who are smarter than you because they know lots of facts or numbers or seem to grasp certain concepts faster than you.

You remember back to grade school and this weird student program called TAG (Talented & Gifted) that you were never invited to be a part of.

I’m here to tell you that the entire racket is bullshit.

No human is inherently more intelligent than another. We all have a brain that’s nearly exactly the same when we’re born (barring injury or an unfortunate birth defect).

The difference is how we use it through our life.

The more you study the current state of artificial intelligence (e.g., math equations), the more you realize that these things are conceptually similar. Machine learning algorithms require lots of data and using that, optimize the structure of this neural network in order to “understand” the information contained within that data. The more data you feed through it, the “smarter” the AI becomes.

And so, in much the same way, the more data you put into your brain, the smarter you become. But how do you put data into your brain?

You read. You interact with your environment. You experience the world. You ask other people questions to help you understand. Some people spend their entire lives fascintated by a single subject (e.g., hitting a baseball with a bat, writing a poem, drawing a picture, starting businesses, taking care of animals, etc). And what happens when you do this for a long period of time? You become an expert because you’re able to see subtle details that others might miss.

So, is a person who can draw a beautiful illustration smarter than an accountant who uncovered something that saved the company $100M dollars?

No.

You’re exactly the same with exactly the same brain. You’ve just fed your algorithm more of a single type of data.

There are some people, however, that seem to pick things up easier than others. A prodigy you might say. What’s actually happening is that person’s early brain architecture or experiences were somehow already optimized for that task through random luck or DNA. But these people still had to spend their 100,000 hours focused on their task. Stephen Hawking has spent his entire life in one subject. And so, he’s pretty damn “smart” about that subject.

He’s read a lot and tried to understand by making new connections. In essence, he fed his brain lots of data and kept re-architecting his neural network by trying to understand. He continually optimizes his brain on physics and the fundamental laws of the universe.

So, I hope to god that some young kid comes across this and stops believing he’s not smart because he didn’t get selected for the Talented & Gifted program at school. Instead, he realizes that it’s just other people, who are also flawed, just trying to get through their day, make a bit of money, so they can go watch a movie with their family.

Don’t let that discourage you from learning. From finding something that fascinates you, and let it pull you into new and interesting places.

You have a brain. You are smart. You have the unbelievable opportunity to train your brain on anything you want. A physical endevour. A purely intellectual one. Or maybe something more soulful. Heck, even something at the intersection of all three.

The only way you fail to be smart about anything is if you never exist in the first place. Guaranteed you already know a lot of stuff that other people have no clue about. The question you have to answer for yourself is where you place your value. In the stuff you know and love. Or the stuff you don’t.

It seems pretty obvious which side you should value. The one that lights your soul on fire.

Intelligence is a myth. It’s just some people have read more about some things than you have.

— Sean