The No. 1 reason smart people fail to be happy

No one wants to always be alone forever.

Smart people often feel misunderstood because they crave fewer but deeper connections.

Some people make themselves more of an outsider than they actually are — there’s always common ground to be found if you look for it, and for smart people, this is actually quite easy to do.

This “me-against-the-world” mentality leads to other, even more destructive behaviors.

Intelligent people allow themselves to get bored too easily.

Everything worthwhile takes years of dedicated focus, but if you’re busy chasing new idea after new idea because hey, “you’re so good at everything,” you’ll never get the satisfaction of seeing something all the way through to the end.

The final and worst kind of self-sabotage is trying too hard to blend in.

Self-sabotage is sneaky but not impossible to sniff out and turn off.

The problem is if we consider happiness to be some complex product of many factors, in the long run, we’ll start valuing those factors over happiness itself.

As a smart person, you probably don’t believe in coincidence, and so, maybe, you should start believing in this: You can be smart, and you can be happy. Intelligence and happiness are not mutually exclusive, and it’s not a tradeoff either.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, and don’t give up until you’ve cracked your unique happiness puzzle.