I think that depends on your attitude toward it. People who are self-consciously smart and think it's worth something are irritating, like beautiful people who feel like they don't need to have a good personality. It can develop into a complex if you are not careful to balance it with real emotional intelligence, just like any unbalanced thing. (Unbalanced things are unstable. Consider how many lottery winners lose all of their money. The money is a new, unbalanced influence in their life. It hasn't always been there, so it's not a balanced part of that life, and may just evaporate as things <i>do</i> come back into balance.)<p>It's best to just forget about being smart, and assume you're smart enough to do anything. The best way to be smart is just that it removes "I'm not smart enough to do X" from the way you think. If it does anything else, it's probably not good. It shouldn't make you think you don't have to try, it shouldn't raise your expectations, only just take "I'm not smart enough" off of the table. In fact, there's always someone smarter anyway. I find that, while keeping any sense of self-congratulation in check, without developing a superiority complex, I do need to keep in mind to a limited extent that I actually <i>am</i> smarter than a lot of people, so I do need to sometimes review their decisions and that some of the rules really don't apply to me. It's a fine line between that and hubris or narcissism, and it did take me sometime to come to that balance, going through "I'm better" to "I'm no better" to simply "I'm different, not really better or worse, but uniquely capable and in a position where I'll have to keep in mind that sometimes I'm wrong, but sometimes, the world is wrong." In the judicial system, you're judged by a jury of your peers. But there is an added responsibility if you are without peer. No one really has the insight to act as a check on your thinking, so you can be alone the way a pilot can be in a cabin full of passengers. They're not any less valuable than you, but they're really not in any position to review your decisions.<p>It's hard to explain.