You can spot her from a mile away, the brightest one in the bar  —  or, if not quite from a mile, nonetheless from very far.

She doesn’t necessarily think of herself as smart, if she thinks of such things at all. Still, her brain is crafted  with care —  self-crafted and stylized  — like a work of art.

Her eyes are alert and bright and lively. They twinkle. She’s relaxed and polite, with a well-modulated voice that speaks to you in the appropriate tone. Her smile glows like expensive stone. You don’t quickly forget that smile.

She walks purposefully, and yet not aggressively, or with an over-mannered style. She has a sense of humor and often laughs, as she also often smiles.

You can see that she knows there’s a kind of purity in loneliness, that every loneliness is a pinnacle, and she doesn’t go out of the way to seek friends or groups or any kind of crowd.

In general she prefers quiet to loud.

She gives and receives compliments easily and grasps that in everyone healthy confidence comes ultimately from thought — not for the sake of knowledge alone or as a kind of end in itself, but rather the effort of thought, the effort of integration, which is the effort of attention — in brief: all the things you don’t learn in college.

Neither frivolous nor vain, I need hardly mention, diffident nor haughty, yet assertive and strong — outspoken when called for and quick to stick up for herself, unembarrassed by losses, unembarrassed by wins, unapologetic when speaking of things she values, loves, wants to acquire — she at the same time speaks of her shortcomings with an ease you admire.

When communication or clarification is called for, she’s never dismissive or inexplicably silent – never, of course, in any way rude or aggressive and never in any way violent.

What is it with her? people sometimes ask. What secret does she carry? What’s going on inside of her head/ What tricks up her sleeve?

A total disregard for where she may’ve at one time thought her abilities end, for one. This is what the bartender said. She advocates aiming beyond what you believe you’re capable of.

Do things you think you’re not able to do, as I’ve more than once heard her express it to the children she teaches, the children she loves.

She continued:

Nothing is impossible, in this regard. The will to believe is the most important ingredient in becoming what you want. The discipline to follow through is next. It’s also the most difficult.

Why? Why most difficult?

Because it requires hour-after-hour, day-after-day practice.

It requires diligence.

Second – unless you’re in a technical discipline like medicine or mechanical engineering  or organic chem — drop out of college. Better yet, never enroll. Forget the mock word or anagram “STEM.”

College stunts creativity.

College is conformity, groupthink, a lot of conforming to culture or subculture.

The cost of conformity is colossal.

Individuality, on the other hand, is a prerequisite of genius.

Genius is the cultivation of what you contain.

The deeper your cultivation, the deeper your genius.

Cultivate, therefore, a durable purpose (not food, not drink, not sex or scotch-and-cigars or any of the other on the endless list of ephemeral things) around which you can construct your life.

Passion is willed: the more you do something, the deeper your understanding of it grows. The deeper your understanding of it grows, the more your interest grows with it. In this way, your passion for a given thing develops and spreads outward like surge of water-ripples.

Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might.

Third, be observant.

Pay attention.

Attention is the seat of human will: the fundamental choice we face, all day, everyday — the choice to focus the mind and pay attention. This is forever pitted against the constant strain of inattention.

What, after all, does it actually mean to be smart?

It means to self-stylize your brain, like a work of art.

It means to observe the universe around you, as well as the one within: to introspect, as thoughtful people do.

It means to be intelligent, like you.

Intelligence is your mental capacity to deal with a wide range of thoughts and ideas.

That’s why it never mattered to you when you were voted least likely to succeed – why it never fazed you when they called you a misfit, a malcontent, alienate, disaffiliate, deviant, reprobate, no-account. It’s why your natural-born predilections and proclivities and predispositions are and always have been irrelevant to you: because intelligence is an acquired skill.

It must be developed by each person’s own desire, activated by each person’s will.

It must be habituated and automated by each person’s own mind.

Which is why it’s quite rare and quite beautiful, and difficult to find.

This, incidentally, is true for both children and adults alike: the cultivation of intelligence requires effort – or, to put the same point in a slightly different way: thinking is an act of choice — a continual act of choice for each and every person, across the long arc of her or his life.

Thought requires effort.

Effort can be called work.

Whereas to be stoopid is relatively simple: all you have to do, in essence, is do nothing. If you do nothing, stoopid will naturally occur.

Being smart, however, requires a different sort of action, as it were.

It’s first and foremost not passive.

On the contrary, thinking is an entirely active process the undertaking of which, when you consider it for even a moment, is in actuality massive.

She’s intelligent, yes, they often say, but in a highly unorthodox manner and way — a way that’s difficult to pinpoint or precisely name, and even harder to quantify or even say exactly how she’s smart, I’m not sure why. She’s bookish but not book-smart, reflective, introspective, certainly, but most of all everything she does – yes, everything – she does with all her heart.

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