My messy home office I finally started to create before moving to Singapore.
I started working online at 14. I was writing video game news, sharing my journey and being relentlessly online almost 16 hours a day except school days. My story of being the dumbest person in the room starts there.
Most of the time I found myself in rooms full of smart people talking about relatively big decisions for that phase of my life. Sometimes it was a website update, sometimes it was how to deal with one of the most gigantic companies in the market. I learned a lot from those rooms. And I think being the dumbest person in the room is one of the easiest ways to learn, if you can handle it.
It's November 2025 and my teammates are building a humanoid robot just a few steps away from me, another team is developing agents for long horizon tasks. I'm surrounded by highly qualified people making something awesome.
Sometimes I find myself in meetings with people I would have been thrilled to just watch, and now I'm sharing things with them. This is good. When I look back at rooms where I was the dumbest person, I'm grateful for those moments. That discomfort encouraged me to be the dumbest person in different rooms, better rooms in some sense.
I love how Annie Duke frames decisions. You made the right call if you picked the option with the biggest expected outcome. Deliberately being the dumbest person in the room is one of those decisions for me. But that only makes sense if you know how to extract value from it.
So how do you actually deal with it?
The first thing to do is accept it. If someone says something you don't understand, you can just say "I don't know what that means." Sometimes they'll explain, sometimes they won't, but at least you're being honest, and honesty is in short supply. Accept that you're the idiot in the room and lean into it. You need to be confident enough that even as the dumbest person in the room, you can still add value.
The trick is figuring out what people in the room need:
- What value can I create that would be useful to them?
- What can I do better than anyone else here?
The answer to this question usually becomes the answer to what I need to learn. For example, when I'm in a room full of great engineers, instead of trying to become a great engineer myself, I focus on how to make their work shine better. This is how you add value without competing on the same dimension everyone else is optimizing for. I wouldn't say competition is for losers, but competition itself is artificial, something that makes things understandable in the business world. Comparing humans isn't really meaningful.
Maybe the formula is something like this:
- develop yourself enough to be the dumbest in the room without feeling worthless
- know yourself well enough to stay grounded
- find which room you need to be the dumbest in
- question what unique value you can bring to people in that room
- then learn, create value, become better
Repeat with harder rooms, or find a room that makes itself progressively harder with time.
Dealing with this determines how far you can actually go. Sometimes self-doubt creeps in. "What am I doing here? This is way over my head." The only way through is action.
I've moved through different industries such as video games, eCommerce, AI, now robotics. Each time the pattern is the same: understand the reality and language of where you are, figure out how you can be useful, then show up. Confidence comes from that understanding, and when you're aware you're not good at something, the barrier to action drops. You move faster because you're not protecting an image.
Another perspective also compounds on the first step. I believe discomfort is the curriculum that teaches you what to do. If you feel discomfort on the stage where you have to be, learn how to speak on the stage. If you feel discomfort in the situation you have to solve, learn how to deal with it. If you're the dumbest person in the room, everyone around you is a teacher. And if you actually know how to learn, life becomes a lot about learning.
You learn from everything, therefore there is no guide, no philosopher, no guru. Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
Being the dumbest person in a room means you're doing something right, unless you're just very lucky.
We're all basically sophisticated apes trying to change the world with AI and robotics. Some apes are better at it than others. But sometimes you need to ask whether the intelligence being performed in that room is actually producing useful insights, or if it's just social signaling. Whether it's helping anyone, or just reproducing hierarchies.
The room matters as much as being the dumbest person in it.