You don't have to be smart, you just have to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself. The rest will happen automatically. Have you tried joining on

You don't have to be smart, you just have to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself. The rest will happen automatically. Have you tried joining one of these projects you mentioned as open source contributor? I know at least some of them are always happy to get more people to join and help. And not just with code contributions. They also have (CRUD) websites that need maintenance, docs to be written, events to be organized, and training/marketing material to be produced. You might be surprised, how these seemingly smarter people end up being super happy about your contribution, as usually what is easy for you will be hard for them, just as you might see it the other way around. And because you said you have wife+kids, your time might be limited: there are also ways to get paid to participate, at least around the bigger projects.