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Comment by spyremeown | Hacker News Reader

>Being more hard working and more intelligent than the competition won't get you very far in anything except purely practical work.

Ouch, I really felt that.

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It's true. I'm objectively more intelligent than my cofounder. He knows it, I know it. He's the far better manager than I am and grew to lead half the company, almost 5x more reports than me.

It's really all about empathy, structure, but first and foremost the ability to pass on the work to _someone else_ and make them succeed at it.

I tend to nerd snipe myself much more often because I like the technical challenges.

Sounds like you are both smart enough to realize and appreciate that while you each have strengths, you compliment each other.

Many would become envious of each other or allow their egos to get in the way, so good on you.

Everyone thinks they are more intelligent and hardworking than the people around them.

Not really, lots of people know they aren't the "smartest guy in the room", or "the most specialised" or whatever, but trust their people skills, family connections, visions or simply brute force their way up.

The point is that social skills and networking will get you much much further than being the semi silent, guarded and "honourable" person sitting in the corner of the room - even if you are actually way "smarter" than the socialites or the people with a flair for marketing, social games, politics etc.

Building excellence will always require you following the old adage of "if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room". There is exactly one person in the world to whom that doesn't apply in any given field.

Being "quietly smarter than everybody" is a huge alarm signal that you're stuck at your current level and won't grow much further unless you change circumstances.

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