My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).
So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.
I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.
I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.
d00ery@lemmy.world 3 days ago
“A big fish in a little pond”, it’s how I described my po achievement in my first job out of uni.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Big-fish–little-pond_effect