Don’t Surround Yourself With the Smartest People

Start thinking in vectors

I always get sick before my birthday. It’s a predictable malaise—a week of feverish self-audits, apologetic emails to professors, etc. Last week, I looked it up—ChatGPT and DeepSeek attributed it to “thinking too much about the future” (a generous, poetic spin on my birthday’s overlap with MLK weekend post sickness). But, birthdays force us to confront the gap between who we are and who we want to become.

Last week, a friend breezed past me in the quad, already late to his fourth coffee chat of the day. When I asked about his New Year’s resolutions, he grinned: “Forty meetings a week. Gotta know everyone in our class.”

Places like Stanford sell proximity as power: “You go to surround yourself with the smartest people.” It’s a sexy idea—adjacency to brilliance as a kind of osmosis. But human connection has natural limits, according to Robin Dunbar: 150 casual ties, 15 true confidants, and five who’d witness our unraveling. So my main concern is that we misunderstand human connection.

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This brings me to linear algebra, in which my study group has started describing people in vectors—or at least, what a friend claimed to see when inebriated.

People, like vectors, have direction (cooperative vs. adversarial) and magnitude (values, ambitions). Sure, you can have similar magnitude and proximity (like in the same dorm) with Sama or Zuck—and you can still repel like mismatched magnets. The meaningful ones? There’s a natural synergy that makes the relationship feel energizing. They align, most importantly in direction, in a way (hopefully a cosine similarity of <45 degrees) that multiplies your momentum.

But how do you know someone’s vector? That’s when I was chatting with my friend Peter Bennett (whom everyone should follow) about the Prisoner’s Dilemma: the classic game theory paradox where two suspects must choose between loyalty and self-interest. On paper, betrayal seems logical. But Robert Axelrod proved a deeper truth: Does this person amplify or drain you? Do their actions align with their words? Over time, patterns emerge—predictive signals that reveal their vector’s true direction.

When relationships align in direction (<45 degrees, hehe), success seems to stop being zero-sum. My closest friends share this alignment. Some specific traits I’ve noticed:

1. MAGNETISM: genuine curiosity that pulls people in

2. Pragmatic strangeness: uniqueness with purpose

3. Self-security

4. High discernment

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Today I turn 19. What I want mostly is to find my cooperative vectors, the ones whose angles will align. To find joy in friendships where we want the best for each other—and let compound trust do the rest.

So, maybe my type of birthdays are to ask: Who makes my life feel clearer? Who sees the me I’m becoming?

PS: Great conversations are the best gifts

PPS: We should be more like bears! They have admirable social habits—but that’s a conversation for another day