Intelligence is a Curse.

You ever noticed that when you’re talking to someone far smarter than you, their thinking is so leaps-and-bound that you don’t get how they landed wherever they did — and just as importantly, they don’t get where you got stuck. Their step size isn’t yours. One of their steps equals a hundred of yours. So after two steps, they’ve lost you, and you’ve lost them. And when they try to come back and find you, they can’t — because one of their steps is a hundred of yours. They can’t possibly locate that 1% tick mark on the progress bar.

That’s the smart person’s curse. It sharply limits your circle of real communication, it limits your worldly growth, and you end up unable to grasp a lot of things. The problem is: you understand things in one clean leap to 100%, but you will never, ever understand what 1% or 2% actually feels like.

Someday, when you’re actually running things — when the people you lead aren’t you, but Guo Jing, and the customers you serve aren’t you either, but Guo Jing — if you can’t understand them, you won’t be able to do anything at all.

In ancient times, when passing down the throne, they stressed “virtue and gravity” (人品贵重). What does that even mean?

Look at rosewood. A thousand-year-old zitan, a hundred-year-old sour branch — they grow so slowly that their density becomes immense. Fast-growing trees? Those are just commercial timber. Smart, jumpy thinkers leap from 10% straight to 20%. What does that usually do? It plants a whole pile of hidden risks for the future.

Being born with cheat codes is one thing; resisting the urge to use them is another. It’s a test of character every single moment. You have wings, yet you insist on walking like Tang Sanzang — one footfall at a time, across a hundred and eight thousand miles. But if you don’t walk that path, you’ll never experience those 1%s and 2%s along the way. And how could you possibly understand what anyone else is doing, what they’re capable of, or what they’re trying to do?