I meet brilliant people constantly, people who can solve complex problems, who stay current with research, who see subtleties others miss. Raw intelligence is no longer scarce. Between YouTube lectures, arXiv papers, and now AI, you can learn anything. The bar for "smart enough" keeps rising, but the payoff for being even smarter keeps shrinking.
Yet we keep optimizing for intelligence anyway. In hiring, partnerships, co-founders... we hunt for the smartest person in the room, as if intelligence and success were linear. They're not. Beyond a threshold, returns diminish sharply. You need to be smart enough to grasp your domain, but past that point, something else matters more: courage.
Not the performative kind. Real courage means saying what everyone's thinking but won't voice. Building something that might fail publicly. Being willing to look foolish, to be wrong where others can see.
This shows up everywhere in behavior. People optimize to look smart: sharing the right articles, using the right jargon, signaling they've read the right books. Almost nobody optimizes to be brave, because bravery carries real downside. You might be wrong. People might laugh. People might judge you.
The gap between knowing and doing is where opportunity hides. Most people can figure out what needs doing, they just won't act when the outcome is uncertain. As AI makes knowledge even more accessible, this gap becomes the entire game. And it's filled with fear.
There are still domains where intelligence alone suffices: stable, well-defined problems in established fields. But building something new, saying something true that people don't want to hear, making decisions with incomplete information? That takes courage. Intelligence tells you what's possible. Courage makes it real.
So yes, hire smart people. But when choosing between someone smarter and someone braver, take the brave one. We've got plenty of intelligence. What we need is courage.