You know you're smart when you measure your time to understand new and complex...

You know you’re smart when you measure your time to understand new and complex things in hours, and mastery in days.

The problem comes when you hit something that’s truly outside your domain. That’s when you become even more unrealistic about how fast you can learn it, because you’re not learning one thing, you’re learning several at once.

This is a typical smart-person problem: If we can’t get a handle on something right away, we tend to give up. We’re so used to things being easy that true complexity frustrates us fast.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re probably not smart enough to have this problem. But Dan’s right, if you can combine a high IQ with the ability to stick with hard things long enough to master them, or to master clusters of hard skills that make you dangerous, then there’s almost nothing you can’t do.

For example: I’m not a computer programmer. But that’s not stopping me from setting up and customizing my own AI systems, training them, writing Python to connect them together, and building tools with Flowise.

Flowise helps, it lowers the barrier. But it’s also limited. And the things I want to build go beyond the limits of any system that currently exists.