Intro

This is a hard topic for me to cover, not because it’s deeply personal or anything like that, but because of its complexity, nuance, and subjectivity.

This will probably be one of my most disorganized and open-ended blog posts to this day. I feel unsatisfied posting this, because I feel unsatisfied in determining a concrete message that I’m trying to convey through this. I am really just writing this to explore my own thoughts because I am still trying to come out of this train of thought with a clear lesson, moral, or message for myself.

Hopefully, you read this to spark your own ideas, and not as something with satisfying insight.

What started this?

On multiple occasions, I found myself stuck on a difficult math concept. I’ve never really ran into something I truly couldn’t do or understand, but it’s nearly every time that when I do feel like I finally understand something, I realize and notice that there is always a classmate who knows and understands it better.

But truly, what really got me thinking about this is this thought:

There are always levels to things. Despite how far I could go or have gone, there is always someone else who could go further, have gone further, with fewer resources, in a shorter amount of time.

Let me go over two examples that encapsulate this feeling.

Integrals

I was stuck on a math problem having to do with integrals. It was stuff I had just learned, and required a strong understanding of many different concepts in order to solve.

I asked my friend who took the class the year before—a friend who I already knew was crazy intelligent. He solved it easily in just a few minutes, despite telling me that he hadn’t had to deal with these kinds of questions and concepts in over a year.

APCSA Algorithm

There was an assignment in my AP Computer Science A class that I just couldn’t figure out. It had something to do with a sorting algorithm. I was stuck on it for nearly an entire hour, and my friend solved it in like five minutes.

At that moment, I felt so frustrated. Looking back at writing this now, this was genuinely hilarious. I don’t know why I find this so funny, but anyway, those are just two examples of this occurrence.

Comfortability

So, doing more research on what I’m describing here, I found that it’s often boiled down to upward social comparison.

“Occurs when individuals compare themselves to others perceived as superior, better off, or more successful. While often fostering feelings of inadequacy, envy, or decreased self-esteem, it can also serve as a source of motivation, inspiration, and self-improvement.”

When this happens, I don’t really feel inadequate, envious, or insecure, but it just gets me thinking again and again about how there is always someone else who will always be better than me at doing a certain thing.

I’ve gotten used to this feeling and understanding that some other people just understand certain things better than I do. But this realization started making me wonder: if someone out there will always be better than I am at something, why should I choose to specialize in learning it in the first place?

So what does this mean for me?

The main reason why I’m writing this now is that I have recently been investing more time in developing my programming skills. In tackling these difficult concepts, I keep thinking about how others easily grasp the things I struggle with.

I started asking myself, what is the minimum intelligence benchmark for someone to be successful in the world of programming? As in, how intelligent does someone really need to be to compete with other programmers?

I ask this to see if the capacity of skills I can acquire through raw hard work is enough.

Let’s face it, it is extremely unlikely, or next to impossible, for someone with an IQ of 80 to be successful in a field like software engineering. So again, it all goes back to what is the minimum I need in order to stay competitive with someone else who can do more with less, faster, and better than me.

Let me make this very clear. I do not think IQ is the key determinant for success. However, I believe it is a bigger factor that most people like to admit, just because it is a factor that is largely out of our control, that affects so much of our day-to-day life. It’s a variable that feels out of our control, so it’s easier to focus on what we can control. A mentality that I believe is extremely beneficial. There are certain things in which delusion is of utmost importance to embrace, and this topic is one of those things.

I saw this kind of take online (paraphrased): “Probably around 120+. Once you’re above that, you can become almost anything with enough support, time, and resources. But it still won’t replace thousands of hours of training.”

When I read stuff like that, part of me feels relief: “Okay, so maybe I’m not doomed”, and part of me feels trapped: “So am I just a number with a ceiling?”

And the more honest answer is: I don’t actually think there’s a clean benchmark. Because the people who look “naturally gifted” usually have a whole invisible stack behind them:

• early exposure
• better mental models
• confidence from past wins
• faster pattern recognition
• sometimes just… being interested enough to obsess over something.

So the question “what IQ do you need?” is tempting, but it’s also kind of a distraction.

I think what I’m doing is trying to turn uncertainty into math. Something I very often find myself doing to either procrastinate, soothe my anxieties, and solve this big fear:

What I am really afraid of

I think I’m afraid that my effort won’t matter. That I’ll put in years of work, and still be mediocre compared to someone who just gets it. That I’ll climb a mountain and meet someone at the top who says, “Yeah, I jogged up here.”

This fucks with my motivation, because why grind if my ceiling is someone else’s floor?

Moving Forward

There will always be levels above me.

But there are also levels behind me.

And more importantly, the existence of higher levels doesn’t cancel out the value of climbing. Because the goal was never to be the best human on Earth at integrals or sorting algorithms. The goal is to compound these many skills to become someone better.

Programming isn’t valuable to me because it’s the only thing I will do. It’s valuable because it’s leverage. It’s the ability to create things, solve problems, design systems, help people, tell stories through products, and make tools that didn’t exist yesterday. Someone will do that better than I will.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t learn. It just means I’m not allowed to confuse comparison with destiny.

Conclusion

I think I fall into this pitfall because I am trying to search for certainty in an objectively uncertain and abstract topic.

And maybe that’s the actual point: there isn’t a clean answer. There will never be a final number, a final comparison, or a final “proof” that I’m safe from being outpaced. There will always be someone smarter, faster, and more naturally aligned with whatever I’m trying to do.

But if I’m being honest, the problem isn’t that those people exist. The problem is when I let their existence decide what I’m allowed to become.

So moving forward, I want to treat “there are levels to this” less like a threat and more like a reminder: growth is layered, and progress is still real even if it isn’t first place. The goal isn’t to win the comparison game. The goal is to keep building skills that compound, keep making things, and keep climbing—because I care about what’s on the other side of that effort.