As a fast thinker, everything you say here makes sense to me, especially about quickly pruning dead ends. I admire my slow-thinker friends for not doing that,

As a fast thinker, everything you say here makes sense to me, especially about quickly pruning dead ends. I admire my slow-thinker friends for not doing that, and I've always considered slowing my thinking to be a top career goal. As for whether it's a developed vs innate quality, I don't remember ever thinking differently and being trained to think the way I do because of my environment. I would agree that in our system fast thinkers are rewarded more, but that doesn't mean that our system develops fast thinkers at the expense of slow thinkers, or that its any less innate. It just means that slow thinkers have more difficulty being recognized earlier (hence "late bloomer" or missing the "precocious" label.