"If you’re really bright — have you ever thought about what it is to be intelligent?
You meet your friend, and he’s pretty dumb, and maybe you think you’re smarter, and you wonder what the difference is?
I’ve thought about this a little bit myself, and it seems to me a lot of it’s memory, but a lot of it’s the ability to zoom out.
Like, you’re in a city and you can look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city, and while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you can just see it all out in front of you. You can see the whole thing, and you can make connections that just seem obvious because you can see the whole thing. And that’s why bright people feel guilty a lot. Because they come up with stuff that they just say “hey look at this” and other people give them these awards and they feel … funny.
But the key thing is that if you’re gonna make connections that are innovative, if you’re going to connect two experiences together, you’ve gotta not have the same bag of experiences that everyone else does, or else you’ll make the same connections, and you won’t be innovative, and no one will give you an award.
So what you’ve got to do is:
GET DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES.
One of the things about being bright is everyone puts you on this path … you know to go to high school, go to college …
but you might want to think about going to Paris and being a poet for a few years.
Or you might want to go to a third-world country; I’d highly advise that … it’s very much so worth doing.
Fall in love with two people at once.
Walt Disney took LSD. Once. And that’s where the idea for Fantasia came from. It’s true. You can go hear stories about all these people and the key thing that comes through is that they had a variety of experiences that they could draw upon in order to solve a problem or attack a dilemma in a unique way.
And so one of the things that you’ll get a lot of pressure to is to go in one direction, and believe in god, and all that other stuff. And that’s great, but don’t walk by a zen buddhist because of that. Sit down and talk and buy him lunch.
One of the things that I had in my mind growing up, and I don’t know how it got there, was that the world was something that happened just outside your peepers, and you didn’t really try to change it, you just sort of tried to find your place in it and have the best life you could, and it would all just go on out there and there were some pretty bright people running it.
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One of the thing that motivates a lot of people that I’ve seen that actually get out and do something in ANY different field is that we all eat food that other people cook and wear clothing that other people make and use languages that other people evolved and use someone else’s mathematics, and we’re sort of taking from this giant pool, constantly, and the most ecstatic thing in the whole world is to actually put something back in that pool.
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It’s the most ecstatic thing that I’ve encountered. So I would highly recommend it."
Steve Jobs(the contextual in joke is that he’s addresses a roomful of attendees at a conference about Achievement)