The One Where I Realize Genius Has Different Shapes

Today I realized intelligence doesn't have one face.

It started with Young Sheldon. If someone like Sheldon can exist — someone gifted in the obvious "school-smart" way — then every other kind of person must have their own version of genius too. A super high-IQ ESTP wouldn't look like Sheldon. They might look like Donald Trump — instinctive, tactical, media-savvy, dominant, brilliant at capturing attention. A super successful ESFJ might look like Taylor Swift — relational, strategic, loyal to her audience, turning personal emotion into collective myth. An ISFP might build an empire through taste. An ENTJ through command. An INFP through inner-world imagination.

And then I thought — maybe I want to become that for INFJ. Not by becoming famous for being "deep," but by turning depth into something real. Something playable. Something useful. Something alive. Maybe my kind of intelligence isn't just reflection and symbolism and pattern-reading. Maybe it can become product. Design. Systems. Games.

That brought me back to Ice Age Life.

I keep feeling behind because there are so many bugs and systems still to improve. But I only started seriously building it in late March, which means it's been a little over a month. A two-month ship timeline isn't actually bad for a solo game app. And if June becomes the month where I keep improving it after launch, then Ice Age Life becomes a three-month art piece — not a failure, not a delay, just a real creative cycle.

Maybe this is my first real art piece. Art takes time. Renaissance artists didn't finish massive works overnight. Big pieces need drafts, corrections, awkward phases, layers. That doesn't mean the work is wrong. It means the work is being made.

So May is for getting Ice Age Life ready to ship. June is for improving it. July can be when I start seriously focusing on College Life. And later, the third game should probably be Time Travel Life — that feels like the perfect fusion of my game style, my history obsession, and my love of alternate paths.

The trilogy kind of makes sense as a shape: Ice Age Life is survival, College Life is identity, Time Travel Life is destiny. I like that.

And underneath all of this is my actual life. If unemployment benefits end around mid-May and my apps are making some money, maybe it's okay to keep going without a full-time job for a while — but only if I treat it seriously. Not as drifting. Not as avoidance. As a real 90-day indie studio trial.

That framing feels different. I'm not unemployed and floating. I'm building. I'm testing whether my creative intelligence can become a real body of work. And maybe one day, if I keep going, I can become one of the greats in my own way — not by copying anyone else's version of genius, but by expressing mine.

Maybe INFJ greatness, for me, looks like this: not just insight, but embodied insight. A world someone can play.