After visiting both MIT and Stanford this last month, one thing I noticed from these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is one of the most important character traits there is. In these environments, raw intelligence alone is not enough. The ability to communicate competence coexists with the competence itself, and neither flourishes without the other. Aura is easy to recognize but hard to explain. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason for this respect is more challenging to pinpoint. I think there are two types of aura: intellectual aura and rhetorical aura. The former is literally how smart you are, based on objective measures. These are people that you genuinely know are smart when you are around them. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily, mainly because the ways we prove intelligence are difficul...
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