On many of my previous birthdays I have published “lessons” from experience. Some friends reminded me about it and demanded this year’s lesson. So here goes:

The most pathetic failure is the intelligent person who erroneously believes their confident ideas are pretty good.
The problem: no one is buying into their ideas. The ideas are baseless, untrue, and mere whims.
These intelligent people often have other intelligent people in their surrounding that could have helped them. One half of these intelligent colleagues don’t care about helping them and merely provide hollow encouragement. The other half try hard to help but are dismissed as discouraging.
So the poor little “intelligent” person is left trapped with their cognitive biases and emotional reasoning.
This leads them to fall for the same blind spot pitfalls again and again, and fail again and again.
Breaking this vicious cycle is not difficult. You have to:
1. Swallow ego and develop humility and patience
2. Be willing to start from a new beginning
3. Get a mentor who knows you, understands you, and cares for you.
That should get you started on the right journey. There is no alternative except winning a lottery. And almost all lottery winners squander away their winnings as they believe they can win a lottery again if they choose to.