why i stopped trying to be the smartest person in the room

the rush projects at école 42 taught me something i did not expect to learn. we would work until 4am, sometimes later. three or four of us huddled around screens, debugging some memory leak that made no sense. i remember thinking i had to be the one to find the solution first. had to prove i belonged there. but the best solutions came when someone would say "wait, what if we are thinking about…