I had the chance to work with a few people I'd consider genius level. While I'm pretty smart myself, they all have something I don't always have: The ability to be happy in any situation and interested in everything.
For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year.
He checks it out, and starts noticing a lot of semi-interesting factoids about names, merged cities, obscure places, old mapping conventions, etc... All of this with an absolute positive energy of pure interest. We spent a fun hour just looking at it. I should have known all this, and yet an hour with him makes me look at it with new eyes.
Wherever he was, he instantly attracted a group of friends and wannabe girlfriends, and never really seemed to notice. Same in this case: There was a group of beautiful partygirls we'd never met before, no nerdy interests at all, which accreted around the map in less than 5 minutes. They loved the situation just as much as us nerds did.
I learned a lot from him, and try to follow this example, but I still can't do this today and am humiliated (in a positive way) by this way of living.
For example, we were walking trough a hallway. On a wall is an old, damaged, ugly map of my country, half covered with graffiti. I'd walked past it almost every day for half a year.
He checks it out, and starts noticing a lot of semi-interesting factoids about names, merged cities, obscure places, old mapping conventions, etc... All of this with an absolute positive energy of pure interest. We spent a fun hour just looking at it. I should have known all this, and yet an hour with him makes me look at it with new eyes.
Wherever he was, he instantly attracted a group of friends and wannabe girlfriends, and never really seemed to notice. Same in this case: There was a group of beautiful partygirls we'd never met before, no nerdy interests at all, which accreted around the map in less than 5 minutes. They loved the situation just as much as us nerds did.
I learned a lot from him, and try to follow this example, but I still can't do this today and am humiliated (in a positive way) by this way of living.