In my professional experience, I got a lot of "oohs and aahs" about the way I think, especially in my 20s. A former well known Chrysler Chairman told his chief economist to use my numbers, in the 80s when they were choosing a new CEO of GM, one of the directors asked me what I thought (this guy was considered the top corporate lawyer in America) and I told him this weird answer. He wrote me a letter (pre-email) six months later and say I was right and paid me a huge compliment on my intelligence.
These things were not mathematical modeling things, they were the weird way I looked at things. There was this guy, got his PhD under Feynman, he always says I am one of the smartest people he knows and he goes to some super computer symposium every year that the top physics guys go to. So it has to be the way I am wired, it is different. When I was in college, cheerleading and drinking and sometimes making it to my engineering classes, my Physics prof asked me to consider graduate work in Physics. I thought he had the wrong person.
I don't think of myself as brilliant. I think of myself being able to see the picture differently. But it gets really noticed. I remember in 9th grade, I had the head of the math department for a teacher and for a lark he gave us some test for graduating students and I did remarkably well, after which he considered me a serious math geek, but by then I had totally lost my drive to learn. How I got to Wall Street was a fluke, but it was the desire to understand how business works and figuring it out that sparked it again.
Ren
