But I think it's precisely because I'm stupid that I'm fine with encountering barriers. I grew up the idiot one out of the bunch; they were inevitable for me. Research is full of barriers for nearly everybody, anyway. It's not like I pursue physics to do exams all the time.

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I don't want to be haughty, either. I struggled. I'm really fucking stupid; it's not like I naturally understand how to fluently discuss conifold and flop transitions after reading a single paper, although I reckon there are some out there who can.

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But you're right. I *know* I'm good at what I do despite not being a natural-born prodigy. I know prodigies who dropped out of the field because they got too haughty and eventually ran into a wall they couldn't surmount. Their pride couldn't take it.

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I think it takes some form of ingenuity to come up with and work on your own research, but that specific type of ingenuity can be developed. My best work came out of problems I formulated on my own and whose methods of attack I developed, but it took a couple years to reliably build that skill.

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They gave me the weed that reminds you of homophobia

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