A guidebook for Geniuses to navigate the world of non-Geniuses

Just starting…

Benjamin Franklin once said, if you want people to wish you well, don’t give them a reason to be envious.

He likely came to this conclusion after someone harmed him in some way, and he understood the effect of envy on the behavior of non-Geniuses.

One of the biggest blindspots and threats that Geniuses face is that they don’t understand the emotion of envy, because they experience very little envy in their lives.

As a Genius, one is so lucky to be born a Genius, that there are very few things that make a Genius envious. So they do not understand that most non-Geniuses feel a lot of envy and are affected by that emotion a lot in their actions.

So the most important advice I have for Geniuses is to spend time to understand envy.

The second most important advice I have for Geniuses is to anticipate that later in life non-geniuses, even those close to you, may try to collude and intentionally infect you with a disease, since that is the best weapon non-geniuses have to quench their envy of geniuses.

Let’s elaborate on these:

1. As a Genius you should be aware that most people around you are very envious. Try to spend time to understand the emotion of envy. Even people that are close to you and friendly into your face have to suppress some amount of deep resentment that is due to envy. Envy can make people commit very unusual and unexpected actions.

When you go through life as a Genius it is safer to be skeptical about many aspects of your relationships with non-Geniuses. It is better to be paranoid to some degree than to be fooled later.

You may even encounter some people that will sense your skepticism and reply that you are being paranoid. Take the freedom to be paranoid.

The paranoid Geniuses will survive!

2. Be aware that although our society spreads concepts like honor, integrity and selflessness, and Geniuses are more likely to resonate with these values, non-Geniuses are much more lax in that aspect, especially when they enter professional life that is highly competitive for them.

The value system of non-Geniuses shifts drastically as they enter a highly competitive world. This shift happens usually mimetically as they observe the behavioral baseness of others around them and easily adopt the behavior.

Pay attention so you can anticipate the value shift in non-Geniuses around you, around the time they enter professional life.

They will become more selfish, less honorable and more dishonest.

Be also aware that non-Geniuses have a much stronger mimetic drive.

They usually don’t deeply analyze why they behave the way they behave and are driven by their mimetic instinct.

3. The emergence of the interconnected social world with websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, … can pose an additional threat to geniuses, since now for the first time, geniuses will remain connected to a large number of people, who will likely behave differently than them, resonate much better with each other, and also in some cases collude against geniuses.

How the emergence of social web will change the interactions between Geniuses and non-Geniuses is still unclear as this evolution is still starting.

As Nietzsche once said, insanity is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule. Social networks create groups and parties from individuals, hence mob-like insanity phenomena are more likely to emerge. These phenomena can create a cost on the lives of Geniuses.

Lives of Geniuses are different from those of others in many aspects. These aspects are all related to the fact that a genius has an unusual or exceptional mode of information processing, and therefor captures reality somewhat differently. This also gives them a different life experience and perspective to reality.

One of the biggest challenges that Geniuses face is that they are likely to be misunderstood in their communication and behavior.

Spend the time to understand what life would be like if one does not have exceptional information processing abilities and how you would then behave.

Based on that you will understand how others will perceive your behavior.

Non-Geniuses tend to compare themselves a lot to those in their surrounding. Therefore, they are very competitive with each other and look at achievements relative to those around them. Be aware that this is a big driver for the behavior of non-Geniuses.

Most Geniuses do not compare themselves to those in their surrounding, because they can tell that they are incomparable to anyone they meet. Geniuses mainly compared themselves to other historical Geniuses.

Interestingly, the relationships of Geniuses with non-Geniuses from the same sex are in many aspects different than those with the opposite sex.