Sunday, November 05, 2023

What is the saddest truth about smart people?

“The most intelligent man in the world has lived a miserable life”

William James Sidis, the most intelligent man in history, son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia, born in New York on April 1st, 1898.

William was a wunderkind, with a prodigious mind and an estimated IQ of 300. He was literally a human computer and a living dictionary.

William J. Sidis never had a childhood or enjoyed being a little boy.

  • Imagine for a moment an 18-month-old child 
    who can unbelievably read The New York Times.
  • At the age of eight, he was fluently speaking French, German, Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Latin, and his native language, English.
  • When he was only 9 years old, he was successfully accepted into Harvard University. Let’s get a little deeper and picture this same small child at 9 years of age, inventing a brand new language called “vendergood
    ,” studied by linguists and declared to be complete, correct, and fascinating.
  • At the age of twelve, he was giving his first lecture about the fourth dimension to the scientific community and the press.

Because William was so intelligent, great things were expected of him, and a bright future was waiting for him.

His parents, a famous Russian psychologist and one of the first female medical doctors of that time, had a very clear goal in mind: to raise a genius. They educated his mind and completely forgot the essential part: his heart and his feelings.

William showed a solid willingness and patience to learn, but constantly being on display for the public and for the media traumatized him, and he began to rebel against everything in his complex and artificial life.

He had severe emotional problems that he was never able to solve. They discovered his dead body in a small apartment in Boston in 1944. He was 46 years old and he died from a stroke.

“I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is through seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”

-William James Sidis-

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