My own experiences I consider a brilliant corrective for being really smart at the age of 10. I was always praised for my brilliance at young ages, from the neighbor man talking to me telling me "talking to you is not like talking to any other 12 year old" to the special class I was put in that required an IQ test to get in, skimmed the top 2% of the school district in to a special class in a remote school that met at different school hours to make busses available.
One great thing was to make a friend who was at least as smart as me, but way more unconventional. He applied to Caltech and to MIT (he said as his safety school) and that was it.
But the real corrective is to go to a great academic school. My freshman year at Swarthmore was the hardest academic year I had after 4th grade. Being around other smart 1%'ers is the way to go, to get a little normal or integrated. Bell Labs research area as a technician working for nobel prize winners and Caltech for graduate school planted me firmly in the middle of my peer group.
Also, read Feynman. Not his physics books necessarily but everything else. I was lucky enough to sit in the Physics Lecture every week with Feynman for a few years. He asked questions when he didn't understand things. I even got to tell him something that he admitted wasn't trivial when I was a 2nd year graduate student. (It was that photons in a waveguide have a finite rest mass, whereas it is only photons in free space that have zero rest mass and travel at the speed of light.)
If you are always the smartest guy in the room, chances are you have not worked hard enough to find the right room.
I read
If you are always the smartest guy in the room, chances are you have not worked hard enough to find the right room.
A month later it is still I maxim I hold. Thank you.
(If I do anything wrong here, please tell me. I don't know what I'm doing and would benefit from being told what I've got wrong, if anything. I've never made a top-level post here before.)
So, it seems like most people here are really smart. And a lot of us, I'm betting, will have been identified as smart when we were children, and gotten complimented on it a lot. And it's pretty common for that to really mess you up, and then you don't end up reaching your full potential. Admittedly, maybe only people who've gotten past all that read Less Wrong. Maybe I'm the exception. But somehow I doubt that very much.
So here's the only thing I can think of to say if this is your situation: ask stupid questions.
Seriously, even if it shows that you have no clue what was just said. (Especially if it shows that. You don't want to continue not understanding.) You can optimize for being smart, you can optimize for seeming smart, but sometimes you need to pick which one to optimize for. It may make you uncomfortable to admit to not knowing something. It may make you feel like the people around you will stop thinking you're all-knowing. But if you don't know how to ask stupid questions, and you just keep pretending to understand, you'll fall behind and eventually be outed as being really, really stupid, instead of just pretty normal. Which sounds worse?
Here, let me demonstrate: so, what tags go on this post and how would I know?
So, anyone else know of any similar things to do, to get back to optimizing for being smart instead of for seeming smart?