I strongly disagree with this sentiment. You'd be surprised how effective people that are "smart enough" can be. I've become less and less impressed with peop

I strongly disagree with this sentiment. You'd be surprised how effective people that are "smart enough" can be. I've become less and less impressed with people's innate "genius" and more impressed with their work ethic and focus. I've wasted so much time in my life trying to learn things top down... that is, learn bits and pieces of something to complete a task without fundamental knowledge of the thing I'm working on. I've noticed "geniuses" never work this way. They insist on knowing their fundamentals first and work up from there. A genius' mental framework for problem solving is so well developed that it just seems like they won DNA lottery. Carmack is incredible at what he does, but there are likely many intellectual things that he is terrible at because he has no mental framework for solving those types of problems. It ultimately would take him thousands of hours to be great at those things like the rest of us plebs.