I recently came across this Reddit thread originally entitled “I’m not as smart as I thought I was.” A MIT student wrote the original post that received enormous attention from MIT alumni as well as other “genuis” in various fields. Below I’m quoting a few things from individual replies (and by the way, this post got almost 700 comments).

You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.

So do it.

- comment by Inri137

The best way to learn how to learn is to push yourself into situations where you aren’t the smartest person in the room, and to observe and get help from the people who are the smartest, to find out how they do it.

- comment by teh_boy

A “genius” is just a person who is in love with a topic or field. Imagine how obsessed romeo must have been with juliet. These individuals love learning and practicing their specialty so much that they would like nothing more than to do it 16 hours a day 7 days a week. To them, work is play. It may sound like a wonderful thing to be but keep in mind how incredibly alone you would feel to be the only one in the whole world to see and feel and experience it in this way. Any conversation that you could ever care about will be one sided. Others will listen to you but never feel the same way as you. Noone will have the patience required to work with you as long or as hard as you would like. It is both a blessing and a curse.

- comment by McMonty

MIT doesn’t teach knowledge, it teaches wisdom. And I wish everyone could learn what I learned, because it goes so far beyond books.

- comment by Middens