What can a person of high intelligence do?

What can a person of high intelligence do? Just about anything they feel like doing. Unhindered by social norms or conventions these people train as nurses, work for 15 years and then become successful auto sellers in a matter of months. They live frugal hermitic lives at the bottom of the social ladder one step above homelessness and they live at the top, with a highly developed network that nets them more than they need with little effort. They create dynamic personal partnerships that rely only on commitment instead of a legal promise and proximity. They create optimal conventional partnerships and become society leaders. They live in island paradises and inner cities. They write poetry and develop complex mathematic algorithms. They set their own hours, rising at 2 a.m. to run an international electronics repair service with 3,000 domain names or live off the proceeds of stock investments based on their own esoteric systems. Enchanted by the unknown, they easily forge ahead by teaching themselves necessary skills. They quietly innovate and make huge public splashes on Jeopardy.

Whatever they do, they do fully, completely and devotedly, becoming priests, pastors, nuns, and CEOs. A people of extremes, they end up in jails and sit as district court judges. With highly-focused persistent attention spans, they often pursue an interest exclusively and far beyond ordinary limits. It is not uncommon for a person of high intelligence to have deep knowledge about a rare, complex subculture and little about local issues.

Quickly absorbing, analyzing and mastering whatever comes their way, their biggest problems are boredom and vocational boundaries. Their unifying passions are learning and sharing what they have learned. As a people, they are far ahead of the curve, often leading the rest of society into new, uncharted modes of adaptation purely by example.