I feel like the optimal path is a middle road between the two extremes you listed. I try to learn as much as possible. Once I have learned something, I am qui

I feel like the optimal path is a middle road between the two extremes you listed. I try to learn as much as possible. Once I have learned something, I am quite confident in what I have learned, but I recognize that at any given time, new information may come along which changes or contradicts what I already know. "Strong opinions, weakly held." I really enjoy the "progressive degrees" joke: "When you get your Bachelor's, you think you know everything. When you get your Master's, you realize that you don't know anything. When you get your Doctorate, you realize that nobody knows anything." To your high school/college un-friend's yearbook snipe... based on human nature, I would expect that he just wanted to have the last word on you. However, that doesn't mean there wasn't a point lurking there... I know I enjoy being the center of attention, and I think it's important to discipline oneself to temper that attention-seeking with humility. So maybe what you can take away from that yearbook note is two-fold. One lesson might be, "Show, don't tell." Let your intelligence speak for itself. If the people in the room are supposed to know that you're the most intelligent, they will, based on how you say what you're saying, and how you do what you're doing, as opposed to what you are saying or what you are doing. The second lesson could simply be humility. Maybe your constant striving to be the smartest, while admirable, has given you a subtle sense of entitlement to admiration or good results. It could help to examine that. It's really cool that you're willing to take a step back and ask yourself if there was something under the surface of that comment, especially almost two decades later. I hope you find the epiphany you're looking for this year. Happy holidays!