you don't need to be genius level smart to succeed in life. you just need to have good taste in the problems you want to solve. this taste develops from repeatedly picking low hanging fruit that might become leverage points for bigger opportunities. you see this pattern everywhere you look but it's especially clear in mathematical breakthroughts. when wiles cracked fermat's last theorem he didn't dive headfirst into the main problem but he had the taste to see that taniyama-shimura was the real leverage point. when perelman cracked the poincaré conjecture he saw that ricci flow was the backdoor in. these are examples of taste, of knowing which smaller problems will unlock the bigger ones.