“I'm not smart enough.”

Many people are genuinely not "smart" enough. Saying they are, is likely to cause suffering and waste resources, on both personal and societal levels. It's also insulting towards the intellectually disabled.

"I'm not smart enough" is not always a cop-out, or "a (lame) excuse". It can be a sign of maturity, and a cause of significant respite. Knowing your limits allows those who are intellectually limited to pursue tasks suitable to them, and still be satisfied with life (even though they haven't created Facebook or Pinterest).

Even for the more gifted of us, knowing your limits might lead to a happier life..

The thing is, there are definitely different levels of persistence required and that's obvious to most people who struggle. When I was school, I almost never studied, and even skipped class with some regularity. Still got good grades. It just wasn't hard. It didn't take persistence.

Fast forward. Now my wife is in school and she studies like crazy hours every day and still doesn't absorb the material well. It takes her tremendous persistence and she is frustrated by people in her class who, like me, could just roll in having glanced over the material and do well.

That said, I agree with the meat of the article. I used to say "I'm not smart enough" to do things like work at "Big Software Corp" or invent novel algorithms, etc. Now I'm more honest and I'll admit "I'm too lazy" to do those things.

When I go to places, I just tell people I'm a garbage man or "waste disposal engineer." That's usually a super quick conversation.

But to your point, engineering is just persistent and consistent effort. Most people don't want to put the time and effort to really learn the science.

It is a copout. But, the next step is realizing that this is one way people prevent change from occurring, change is uncomfortable and scary. I don't think it's particularly empathetic to get upset at people's common thought processes, even when they are bad. Try to remember we're all humans and life is hard and everyone is already trying.

Also keep in mind that the person saying it may mean it more as flattery - i.e., it may be a polite lie and they don't really think that. And of course, "I'm not smart enough to do that" is more polite to say than "that sounds boring and I'm super not interested".

Precisely. Programming relies heavily on using others' talents and code and abilities.

For example, I wouldn't know how to do face recognition quickly. But thanks to OpenCV and QT, I was able to make https://github.com/jwcrawley/uWho

I leveraged the code that was written to allow me to go a tiny bit further.

"I'm not smart enough" is, I think, 50% "I'm too intimidated by what I don't know" and 50% "I don't care enough to overcome the initial learning curve."

The Venn diagram in this article really bothers me. Venn diagrams aren't meant to show the makeup of a whole. This should be a pie chart. The diagrams implies that there are more persistent people than inspired people, not that you need more persistence than inspiration.

Thomas Edison was not in a position to judge geniuses, but yes, Tesla did work hard.

I get this all the time. People ask me what I am doing in school and I tell them I am majoring in Business Management with a Computer Science minor.

All people hear is the Computer Science part and every conversation people say, "Oh you must be smart," or "I could never do that."

My response is always, "Nope I am not crazy smart. I just really love computers and I keep at it." People always associate CS with being a genius, I am no genius. I am just a hard headed guy who loves computers, and will always keep trying to get better at whatever I am doing no matter how many times I fail.

Conversely to the article, I am certainly not smart enough to tell someone how to build their own Facebook or Pinterest. That requires more than programming skill; a combination of marketing, business sense, and user experience.

I'm a backend/appsec guy. No way in hell would I do that. It would be arrogant and end in disaster.

That's what teams are for.

Some are persistent at programming, not looking for programming jobs or kissing up to bad people.

I say, If you really want it, you go and you get it, period

When I tell people of my background in mathematics, the second most common reaction is along the lines of "I'm not smart enough" (the most common is the old canard of "I hate math! My old math teacher, Mr. So-and-so, dropped my older sister into a wood-chipper! Feet first!" etc, etc, etc). In a lot of these cases, "I'm not smart enough to do math" was really just a proxy for "I hate math and am uncomfortable talking about it".

It wouldn't surprise me if that was the case for at least some of the people described by the author.

If they don't feel smart enough, that is just going to be compounded by joining a programming community. Smartness is the status symbol to these (us?) people, so get ready for a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle comparisons of people's academic record, what tier of university they went to, what inherent hardness of problem's they have worked on, whether or not they started programming before they could talk, who is working with a language/ecosystem that are seen as intellectually inferior/lazy, whether they are part of the mythical "10X" ũbermensch[1] develeopr, whether or not school-work came effortlessly to them, and so on. No, of course the tone is not as obvious as "I'm smarter than you, or I'm less smart because X, Y, Z". But the underlying tone is clear enough. The best way in these communities is to compliment their smarts, or imply that they are smarter than you. The perfect way to insult them is to insult their intelligence. The common currency is brains.

If they don't feel smart enough, maybe what they mean is that they expect to end up on the bottom of the status hierarchy. And that might be a bit too rough to want to go through with. Especially if you have other interests, aptitude or talents.

[1] Yeah, umlaut-fail.