Memorising things is a pretty important skill for a good hacker. I forget (D'oh!) which famous researcher into comp sci it was, but one of them had done a stud

Memorising things is a pretty important skill for a good hacker. I forget (D'oh!) which famous researcher into comp sci it was, but one of them had done a study on the "uber-programmers" (the guys who out produce normal programmers by a factor of 10 or more) and found that all of them had much better memories than average. The real danger of being too smart in high-school is that because you can pull the answer out of your arse any time you want, you don't develop a good work ethic. And in University, not having a work ethic is almost certainly going to catch up with you. In high school I was in a streamed class (ie all the bright kids) and almost all of them came off the rails in the first year of uni when they got to the end of the year and discovered that they weren't allowed to sit the final exams because they hadn't done the 'stupid' assignments. Naturally, being smarter even than the rest of the smart people, I sailed through first year uni. ... only to come unstuck during the second year. :D A lot of the kids you look at now and despise for their inferior intellects are going to have an easier time of it at university than you, because they've built up a work ethic, and you haven't. You don't have to be bipolar for most of the symptoms the article talks about, just smart and lazy. You get a great idea and half complete it? Not necessarily a bipolar thing at all. Problem is, smart and lazy won't cut it working for 'the man'. So you might think, well, this is HN, I'll just start my own company and 'the man' can go whistle dixie! Unfortunately, while 'the man' frowns on laziness, the free market absolutely despises it. It will hunt you down. murder you and then do unspeakable things to your corpse.