I manifest smartness.

The smartest person in most meetings is the one who asks the question everybody else assumed had already been answered.

It does not feel clever from the inside. It feels exposing, like being the only one who failed to follow. Nine times out of ten nobody followed, and the room has been building on an assumption for six weeks.

Intelligence is less about generating than about noticing — the gap, the number that does not reconcile, the thing nobody has said.

All of which is available to anyone prepared to be briefly uncomfortable in front of colleagues.