One of my high school jobs was working as a sales assistant in a real estate office.

This was my first time experiencing the shocking (to me, at the time) fact that being smarter than everyone else is worthless in the real world.

The focus on academic excellence is probably the most unrecognized evil of public schools. All of the book smarts and reasoning ability in the world mean nothing if you can't or won't put them to work.

In my crowd, I see a lot of very frustrated, very smart people who can't deal with things not just being handed to them for being smart, because that's how they were rewarded / trained in school.

In real estate, I saw some frankly very marginal or even poor intellects kick the shit out of the smart people because they simply had more grit and determination.

In libertarian circles, I see endless lines of people carrying around a collection of the world's greatest insights into economics and human behavior (especially if you've read Human Action) and doing ...