I was recently at MIT Campus Preview Week and Stanford’s Admit Weekend, and the one thing you notice by being in these talent-dense communities is that the unquantifiable quality of having ‘aura’ is the most important character trait there is. Aura is easy to measure. It’s not difficult to see who people respect, but the reason why is more challenging. 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 people are the ones that when you’re around them, you genuinely know that they’re smart. They have good ideas in conversations, and have accomplished respectable things. Overall, they earn respect by being somewhat arrogant but having the intellect to back it up. Most people are able to respect people with intellectual aura pretty easily. Now the latter: rhetorical aura. The effectiveness of this type of aura is more variable, and a lot of the time it's synonymous with being ...
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