Career Advice for Geniuses

Career advice for brilliant people is often different from standard counsel.

Standard careeradvice is to focus rather than dabble, to network your way into a good job, and to be a team player.

Very smart people often require very different advice.

To avoid getting hung up on the thorny issue of how brilliance should be measured, we'll operationally define it as people who believe they learn more quickly, reason more rigorously, and more often come up with smart, circumspect ideas than do most people. If that sounds like you, you might find this article's advice helpful.

Be alert to your fast point of diminishing returns. We all like to do more of what we do well. Brilliant people learn well, so they like to spend a lot of time learning. They recognize that their learning in a domain soon reaches a point of diminishing returns, so they generally want to then move on to something new.

Do not get unduly constrained by the standard advice--e.g., Malcolm Gladwell's--you need to stay focused on something for 10,000-20,000 hours. You are different. Far sooner, you likely would more wisely spend your learning time tackling something new. Move on.

Focus less on networking than do most people. By definition, most people's ability and skills don't rise above the pack. So to land good jobs, get promotions, etc., they need to network so that despite their lack of excellence, powerful people like them enough to give them career goodies.

You do rise above the pack so you needn't do as much networking. Indeed, allocating that time to being productive and/or learning something important will likely yield more good to your career and to the world. 

Avoid being on a team mainly consisting of lesser lights. On a typical team, the birilliant person is in a Catch-22 between showing-up team members and staying silent.

So try to work solo and/or on teams of your intellectual peers. Of course, some team members might have more knowledge than you have in a specific area, for example, technical expertise. That's fine. You just want to avoid being on a team with people that reason poorly, especially if their self-esteem well exceeds their competence so they insist on having their say or even their way.

As Cornell University research found(link is external), most people are not smart enough to know how stupid they are.

Focus on the world-changing. You have the goods to make a big difference. So ask yourself, "What is the biggest goal to which you care to devote your talents?"Understanding brain function? Developing virtual travel? Improving the U.S.government's computer network's firewall?

Don't sell out for money--e.g., investment banking, insurance defense law, bond trading, or involvement with a company or nonprofit whose product or service is inferior and survives because of its marketing.

Give yourself a break. Being brilliant is a burden. People expect you to be awesome all the time. No one can be. You'll screw up. You'll want to veg out. You'll say something emotionally unintelligent. See if there are lessons to be learned from your screw-up and move on. Forgive yourself. Let yourself be human.