I am a knowledge worker. Over the course of my life I've felt insecure about not knowing more than I already do. I took a general cognitive ability test that placed me in the 98% percentile of the population. I don't know how accurate the test was; I know that there are better ones out there. Assuming it's accurate-ish I would be 2 standard deviations above the mean.

I have also been described as a genius more than once, including by peers whose intellect I admire myself. I've also made software contributions and libraries that have stunned my peers. Despite the external signals I often don't really feel smart enough, but this changed when I learned some details about the life of Dr. John von Neumann.

Von Neumann was a true genius. He was certainly smarter than I'll ever be by an insurmountable margin. He made so many discoveries in so many fields that people had to stop naming them "von Neumann's Law" because it was too difficult to figure out which law it referred to.

These were not small discoveries either. He was a big contributor to game theory and quantum mechanics. Von Neumann architecture describes the computers that most of us use. His wikipedia entry is so long describing his contributions that it almost hurts to scroll through it.

I think the most amazing anecdotes I've ever heard are from von Neumann too.

Another genius by the name of Eugene Wigner (who also has a ridiculous wiki page) was quoted as saying:

“I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Max Planck, Max von Laue, and Werner Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother-in-law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. And I have known many of the brightest younger scientists. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jancsi von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men, and no one ever disputed me.”

He was actually paid just to provide scraps of his thoughts:

“For his services, von Neumann would receive US$200 a month – the average monthly salary at that time. The offer from [John Williams, founder of the RAND corporation] came with a charming stipulation: ‘the only part of your thinking time we’d like to bid for systematically is that which you spend shaving: we’d like you to pass on to us any ideas that come to you while so engaged’.”

He had super-human recall. There are sev...

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