List the people you admire and look to for advice…
Admiration and advice are not the same thing, and I think most people conflate them.
The people I admire are mostly dead. Einstein, Feynman, Tesla, Sagan, Taleb if we’re counting the living. What they share isn’t genius, it’s a refusal to perform understanding they don’t have. They held ideas at full weight without needing to make them smaller for the room.
The people I actually open up to? I can count them without using both hands.
Not because I’m closed off. Because real intellectual exchange is rarer than people admit. Most conversations about big ideas aren’t exchanges, they’re performances. Someone talks, someone nods, and the idea itself gets quietly flattened in the process.
I stopped giving ideas to rooms that couldn’t hold them. That’s not arrogance. It’s just pattern recognition.
The few people who get the unfiltered version earn it the same way — they don’t flinch, they push back when they should, and they never ask me to make it simpler just to make them comfortable.
That’s the whole criteria. Small pool. Exactly the right size.
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