Intelligence isn’t static
When people say “X is brilliant”, based on his university degree aged 21, it’s a meaningless statement — X may not have developed since then. You can make yourself more intelligent. One way is to study people with beautiful minds and their good habits:
• They treat every situation as a learning opportunity. If you fall into conversation with one of them, no matter how low status or stupid you are, they will absorb what you say. They won’t try to “win” the encounter (встреча) by hitting you with jargon, titles, name-dropping (хвастовство знакомством с известными людьми) or recitations of stuff they thought up years before. The author of a good article about this in the Financial Times told this story:
“At a wedding once, I got talking to an older guy named Bob about US healthcare. Later, the bride’s sister asked me what I’d thought of Bob. “He’s not dumb,” I said generously. “No,” she agreed, “he won the Nobel Prize for economics.” ‘What was his specialism?” I asked. “Healthcare,” (здравоохранение) she said. And yet Robert Fogel had probably listened more attentively to me than I had to him”.
