Article is atrocious to read, I stopped after the first paragraph and skimmed past the rest hoping for improvement :/
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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I think this article might miss some of what people are saying. I’m pretty dang smart. I am just like this person, I go deep into topics and learn about them and am an expert at very specific things. But the speed at which you learn, and the speed at which you can recall those things, and the speed at which you can then utilize those things without making mistakes is what differentiates us.
I’m sure this person that wrote the article is smarter than me. It doesn’t mean I couldn’t accomplish the same things they do, it would just take longer, take more concentration, and have many more errors along the way.
Intelligence is a often-misunderstood concept. It's kinda like height in basketball.
A person that's 1.50m tall will have little chance becoming a successful professional basketball player, but that doesn't mean that a person that's 2m tall is guaranteed to be great at basketball without practice.
It takes both. And a 1.50m tall person who has played a lot of basketball will likely be better than a 2m person who hasn't, but if the 2m person starts practicing they will overtake the 1.5m person quite quickly.
Smart people like to claim that "it's all just hard work", mostly as a kind of humble-brag ("I am not something special, but I work really hard"), but it's not true. Accomplishing things in intelligence-based fields is a combination of being smart and working hard.
Usain Bolt isn't such an amazing runner only because he works hard, but he has the right genetics for the task. But if he didn't work hard, he wouldn't be such an amazing runner either.
Smart people like to claim that “it’s all just hard work”, mostly as a kind of humble-brag
Usually when we say that it's in response to someone that hasn't put in the work saying we're smart as a way to justify continuing to not put in the work. I spent the first several years of my professional career learning outside of work and still keep tabs on technology in a way that others don't. My skill level is because I methodically cultivated it over years. Maybe I'm "smart" or maybe I'm not, but it's upsetting when someone acts like I was just born good at technology when I spent a lot of time and effort to get this way.