(Part 4 of 7)

← Part 3: The Goldilocks Problem

Parts 1–3 have traced a path: from impressive numbers to the pressure they represent to the systemic failure to recognize and support scaffolding needs to the brilliant minds we're destroying in the process.

But there's another layer I need to name. Because it's not just about recognition or scaffolding, it's about money.

Specifically, it's about this: The world captures enormous value from brilliant minds while systematically refusing to compensate them for it.

And if you're outside the Goldilocks Zone, this becomes a crisis.

Let me be concrete about my own situation, because it illustrates the pattern clearly.

I have generated:

• 11.17 million Grammarly-tracked words

• Nearly 5,000 Quora answers with 4 million views

• Multiple frameworks are used in web3 governance

• Teaching that influences 50+ cohort members annually

• Graphics and visual work that distill complex systems

• Coaching that has shaped how athletes, leaders, and friends understand themselves

That's an enormous body of intellectual output. By any measure, it represents substantial value creation.

And for most of my life, despite this output, I wasn't wealthy.

I had a good-paying job by December 2024. But that took until my late 50s. And even now, the compensation doesn't reflect the value I've generated.

Think about the math:

• 5,000 Quora answers: Free intellectual labor, captured by Quora and its users

• Gravity frameworks: Adopted by projects that profit from them

• Coaching: Often underpaid or unpaid mentoring relationships

• Teaching: Compensation far below the value of the curriculum and guidance

• Graphic work: Designed systems frameworks used by organizations, with minimal payment

Somewhere in that list, value is being extracted.

My father provides the contrast that makes this clear.

My father is also a polymath, even though his boomer generation would not recognize it as such. Brilliant capacity. Deep interests. Strong systems thinking.

But he fit institutional structures better than I did. He found positions in executive roles. He developed advisory relationships. He understood how to convert massive intellectual capacity into organizational prestige and economic compensation.

He became wealthy. Not because he was more brilliant than I am. But because he found institutional scaffolding that compensated for his brilliance.

You can see this reflected throughout my family, and their 'fitting to institutions' capacity, paired with their existing polymathic brilliance, is directly related to their economic compensation, which is far more important than their individual brilliance alone.

I have an aunt, one of my favorite people, who, in other, more artistic cultures, would be a revered figure for her groundbreaking brilliance in newspaper design.

Still, because her industry is almost entirely dead now due to the internet, her value is not understood, not even in retrospect, and her brilliance was also diminished to some degree by her generation's bias against women.

So, she fit to some degree, but the slow death of newspapers lessened her later career brilliance, despite winning many awards in her industry.

I also generated comparable (or greater) intellectual output across more modalities. But I didn't find those institutional structures.

The difference isn't intelligence. It's access to institutions that recognize and pay for the work of brilliant minds.

There's a cultural demand that faces anyone whose brilliance doesn't fit comfortable categories: "Make it simpler."

"Your thinking is too complex." "Your output is too much." "Simplify for your audience." "Focus on one thing." "Make it easier to understand."

What this really means: Reduce yourself to fit our commodity structures.

Because here's the economic reality: complexity is hard to commodify. Simple, legible output is easy to package and sell. But polymathic, interdisciplinary, systems-level thinking that connects across domains? That's hard to monetize.

So the demand becomes: Reduce your complexity so we can sell it.

The Tesla Precedent

Nikola Tesla embodied the polymath-extraction problem a century before the digital age. His genius spanned electrical engineering, wireless transmission, renewable energy, and systems thinking across domains- precisely the kind of polymathic brilliance that doesn't fit standard compensation categories. Edison recognized Tesla's value immediately and exploited it systematically: using Tesla's ideas while denying him credit, compensation, and institutional prestige. Tesla generated enormous value that Edison and others captured, monetized, and profited from wildly. Yet Tesla himself died in poverty, his notebooks seized, his life a cautionary tale of extraction dressed as opportunity.

A century later, Elon Musk built Tesla Motors on the foundation of Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and wireless transmission concepts—the same intellectual output that left the original inventor destitute. Musk found institutional scaffolding (venture capital, corporate structure, market timing) that allowed him to convert those ideas into a multi-billion-dollar company. The irony is almost too perfect: Nikola Tesla struggled for basic resources while generating world-changing ideas; Elon Musk built an empire on refining and commercializing those same ideas. This is not a story about intelligence or brilliance- Tesla, Edison, and Musk are and were brilliant minds. It's a story about institutional structures that recognize, compensate, and amplify certain kinds of minds while leaving others to struggle despite equal or greater contribution.

And when you do reduce yourself—when you fragment across partial outlets, each one legible but none of them whole—you generate value that the world captures for free.

My Quora answers educate millions- at this writing, almost 4 million reads... but I don't get paid according to that value.

If your frameworks inform organizational design, those organizations profit. You don't.

If your teaching changes how people understand themselves. Those people's lives improve. You get paid a fraction of the value you've created.

This is what I mean by extraction. It's not malicious, usually. It's just how the system works:

Brilliant output that doesn't fit standard commodity categories gets captured as free value while the creator struggles for economic stability.

Before examining where the system fails, it's worth acknowledging where it succeeds—because those successes prove what's possible when brilliant, polymathic minds find adequate scaffolding.

Neil Peart stands as one of the clearest examples. Drummer, lyricist, essayist, visual thinker, philosopher—Peart's polymathic brilliance spanned percussion mastery, literary synthesis, motorcycle travel writing, and endurance-athleticism. He didn't fit standard rock drummer categories, yet is almost certainly your favorite drummer's favorite drummer.

But Rush's touring schedule and crew provided scaffolding: a band structure that gave him decades of stability, creative partners who valued his integrative thinking, and institutional support (management, record labels, tour infrastructure) that allowed his full capacity to flourish. The result wasn't just commercial success—it was generational influence across music, literature, and intellectual culture. Peart didn't reduce himself. He found a structure that could hold his complexity and fairly compensate for it.

Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes documents similar patterns across autism and the history of neurodiversity. The British aristocratic families who unknowingly provided scaffolding- financial stability, social tolerance for eccentricity, access to libraries and laboratories- produced some of history's most impactful polymaths.

Henry Cavendish, for instance, revolutionized chemistry and physics not because aristocracy made him brilliant, but because family wealth gave him the scaffolding to pursue complex, interdisciplinary work without economic pressure to reduce himself into marketable categories. The same pattern appears across Silberman's case studies: when neurodivergent, polymathic minds find scaffolding (whether through family resources, institutional roles, or collaborative structures), they generate outsized value and receive recognition proportional to their contribution.

The lesson is unavoidable: The difference between polymathic failure and polymathic success often isn't intelligence, work ethic, or even output quality. It's whether adequate scaffolding exists—and whether that scaffolding comes with fair compensation.

This isn't personal failure. It's structural.

The economy is set up to recognize and compensate value in specific categories:

• Academic credentials (professorship, tenure)

• Executive roles (salary tiers based on position)

• Consulting (billable hours for expert advice)

• Credentialed expertise (law, medicine, engineering)

• Entertainment and media (publishers, platforms, studios)

Scaffolding-needy polymaths often don't fit these categories.

If you generate value through:

• Open-source knowledge sharing (Quora)

• Systems frameworks that cross domains

• Mentoring relationships

• Teaching that doesn't fit academic structures

• Visual and conceptual synthesis

• Integrative thinking that doesn't fit professional silos

...the economy has almost no mechanism to compensate you.

You're generating enormous value. And the system has no box to put you in.

So you either:

1. Reduce yourself to fit a box (and lose the very complexity that makes you valuable)

2. Stay outside the boxes (and struggle for compensation despite generating value)

3. Find institutions willing to build custom structures (rare and difficult to find).

4. Luck into enough privilege or be highly interested in a highly compensated category.

I didn't hit basic economic stability until my late 50s, after decades of generating value that the world captures for free or underpaid.

Years of:

• Coaching for minimal compensation

• Writing for platforms that profited while I didn't

• Developing frameworks that informed organizations that didn't compensate me

• Teaching that changed lives while I struggled for resources

I was fortunate. I had a father with resources. I had the privilege. I survived decades of economic instability that would have broken many others.

And then, at 57, I finally found a role (grant operations) that:

• Paid adequately for the first time

• Allowed me to use my full capacity

• It was structured in a way that my polymathic thinking was valued

But this is the exception, not the rule.

Most brilliant minds outside the Goldilocks Zone don't get this break.

They either:

• Compromise their brilliance to fit a compensated role (losing the very thing that makes them valuable)

• Stay outside and struggle financially (while generating enormous uncompensated value)

• Break under the pressure of unmet needs (for scaffolding and for adequate compensation)

Here's what I want to name clearly:

Society is failing brilliant people on two fronts simultaneously:

First: We don't provide adequate scaffolding (the spillway problem from Part 2). We let the psychological pressure build. We create the conditions for breakdown.

Second: We don't compensate for the value they generate. We capture their output. We extract the value they create. We call it "contribution" while systematically underpaying them.

These aren't separate problems. They're connected.

The person who doesn't have adequate scaffolding is desperate. They'll take any work that partially addresses the pressure. They'll work for inadequate compensation to have some outlet.

The economy knows this. So it offers: partial outlets, inadequate compensation, and a demand to reduce complexity.

And the brilliant person, under pressure and desperate, accepts.

This is an extraction dressed up as an opportunity.

The demand to "make it simpler" isn't neutral. It's cultural colonization of complexity.

It's saying: "Your way of thinking doesn't fit our commodity structures. Reduce yourself."

For polymathic, neurodivergent, integrative thinkers, this is fundamentally violent. It requires amputating your actual cognitive capacity.

And when you do amputate yourself—when you reduce to fit legible categories—you stop generating the very value that makes you uniquely valuable.

You become cheaper to compensate, easier to manage, and less threatening to institutions.

And your actual brilliance goes underground.

My father found a path: fit institutional structures, find roles with prestige and compensation, convert capacity into wealth.

It's not that he reduced himself. He found institutions willing to hold his complexity. And institutions willing to pay for it.

Most polymaths don't find this. They find:

• Institutions that want them to reduce themselves

• Compensation structures that don't recognize their value

• Pressure to fragment across partial outlets

• Slow economic drain over decades

The lucky ones (like I eventually did) find or create structures that work.

But the pattern for most is: generate enormous value, receive inadequate compensation, live with economic instability despite intellectual abundance.

This isn't just a problem for brilliant people. This is a problem for all of us.

Because the value being extracted—the intellectual output, the systems thinking, the integrative frameworks—that's value we all need.

The Millennium Problems. The organizational dysfunction. The inability to solve civilizational challenges. These aren't failures of insufficient brilliance.

They're failures of extraction economics: we're not building structures that allow brilliant people to contribute and be fully compensated.

We're leaving intellectual value on the table. We're destroying the very minds that could help us solve our most significant problems. And we're doing it while underpaying them.

Institutions can continue:

• Demanding that brilliant people reduce themselves

• Capturing their output while underpaying them

• Creating the conditions for breakdown (unmet scaffolding + unmet compensation)

• Blaming the individuals when they break

Or they can choose something different:

• Building scaffolding for polymath, neurodivergent, integrative minds

• Compensating fairly for the value these minds generate

• Creating space for complexity instead of demanding reduction

• Recognizing that the minds that don't fit standard categories are often the ones most needed

In Part 5, I'll talk about what becomes possible at 57 when you finally have both adequate scaffolding and adequate compensation.

I'll talk about integration. About wholeness. About what it looks like to finally express yourself fully.

And I'll talk about what we owe each other—not just as individuals, but as a society.

Because the exocortex isn't just about productivity, it's about justice.

And the spillway isn't just about pressure relief. It's about recognizing that brilliant minds need infrastructure, that infrastructure needs to be recognized as legitimate, and that the value generated needs to be compensated fairly.

Until then, we're just extracting brilliance and calling it contribution.

The change starts when we stop accepting that trade.

Continue to Part 5: Integration at 57 — What Wholeness Looks Like, and What We Owe Each Other →

(Part 4 of 7)

← Part 3: The Goldilocks Problem

Parts 1–3 have traced a path: from impressive numbers to the pressure they represent to the systemic failure to recognize and support scaffolding needs to the brilliant minds we're destroying in the process.

But there's another layer I need to name. Because it's not just about recognition or scaffolding, it's about money.

Specifically, it's about this: The world captures enormous value from brilliant minds while systematically refusing to compensate them for it.

And if you're outside the Goldilocks Zone, this becomes a crisis.

Let me be concrete about my own situation, because it illustrates the pattern clearly.

I have generated:

• 11.17 million Grammarly-tracked words

• Nearly 5,000 Quora answers with 4 million views

• Multiple frameworks are used in web3 governance

• Teaching that influences 50+ cohort members annually

• Graphics and visual work that distill complex systems

• Coaching that has shaped how athletes, leaders, and friends understand themselves

That's an enormous body of intellectual output. By any measure, it represents substantial value creation.

And for most of my life, despite this output, I wasn't wealthy.

I had a good-paying job by December 2024. But that took until my late 50s. And even now, the compensation doesn't reflect the value I've generated.

Think about the math:

• 5,000 Quora answers: Free intellectual labor, captured by Quora and its users

• Gravity frameworks: Adopted by projects that profit from them

• Coaching: Often underpaid or unpaid mentoring relationships

• Teaching: Compensation far below the value of the curriculum and guidance

• Graphic work: Designed systems frameworks used by organizations, with minimal payment

Somewhere in that list, value is being extracted.

My father provides the contrast that makes this clear.

My father is also a polymath, even though his boomer generation would not recognize it as such. Brilliant capacity. Deep interests. Strong systems thinking.

But he fit institutional structures better than I did. He found positions in executive roles. He developed advisory relationships. He understood how to convert massive intellectual capacity into organizational prestige and economic compensation.

He became wealthy. Not because he was more brilliant than I am. But because he found institutional scaffolding that compensated for his brilliance.

You can see this reflected throughout my family, and their 'fitting to institutions' capacity, paired with their existing polymathic brilliance, is directly related to their economic compensation, which is far more important than their individual brilliance alone.

I have an aunt, one of my favorite people, who, in other, more artistic cultures, would be a revered figure for her groundbreaking brilliance in newspaper design.

Still, because her industry is almost entirely dead now due to the internet, her value is not understood, not even in retrospect, and her brilliance was also diminished to some degree by her generation's bias against women.

So, she fit to some degree, but the slow death of newspapers lessened her later career brilliance, despite winning many awards in her industry.

I also generated comparable (or greater) intellectual output across more modalities. But I didn't find those institutional structures.

The difference isn't intelligence. It's access to institutions that recognize and pay for the work of brilliant minds.

There's a cultural demand that faces anyone whose brilliance doesn't fit comfortable categories: "Make it simpler."

"Your thinking is too complex." "Your output is too much." "Simplify for your audience." "Focus on one thing." "Make it easier to understand."

What this really means: Reduce yourself to fit our commodity structures.

Because here's the economic reality: complexity is hard to commodify. Simple, legible output is easy to package and sell. But polymathic, interdisciplinary, systems-level thinking that connects across domains? That's hard to monetize.

So the demand becomes: Reduce your complexity so we can sell it.

The Tesla Precedent

Nikola Tesla embodied the polymath-extraction problem a century before the digital age. His genius spanned electrical engineering, wireless transmission, renewable energy, and systems thinking across domains- precisely the kind of polymathic brilliance that doesn't fit standard compensation categories. Edison recognized Tesla's value immediately and exploited it systematically: using Tesla's ideas while denying him credit, compensation, and institutional prestige. Tesla generated enormous value that Edison and others captured, monetized, and profited from wildly. Yet Tesla himself died in poverty, his notebooks seized, his life a cautionary tale of extraction dressed as opportunity.

A century later, Elon Musk built Tesla Motors on the foundation of Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and wireless transmission concepts—the same intellectual output that left the original inventor destitute. Musk found institutional scaffolding (venture capital, corporate structure, market timing) that allowed him to convert those ideas into a multi-billion-dollar company. The irony is almost too perfect: Nikola Tesla struggled for basic resources while generating world-changing ideas; Elon Musk built an empire on refining and commercializing those same ideas. This is not a story about intelligence or brilliance- Tesla, Edison, and Musk are and were brilliant minds. It's a story about institutional structures that recognize, compensate, and amplify certain kinds of minds while leaving others to struggle despite equal or greater contribution.

And when you do reduce yourself—when you fragment across partial outlets, each one legible but none of them whole—you generate value that the world captures for free.

My Quora answers educate millions- at this writing, almost 4 million reads... but I don't get paid according to that value.

If your frameworks inform organizational design, those organizations profit. You don't.

If your teaching changes how people understand themselves. Those people's lives improve. You get paid a fraction of the value you've created.

This is what I mean by extraction. It's not malicious, usually. It's just how the system works:

Brilliant output that doesn't fit standard commodity categories gets captured as free value while the creator struggles for economic stability.

Before examining where the system fails, it's worth acknowledging where it succeeds—because those successes prove what's possible when brilliant, polymathic minds find adequate scaffolding.

Neil Peart stands as one of the clearest examples. Drummer, lyricist, essayist, visual thinker, philosopher—Peart's polymathic brilliance spanned percussion mastery, literary synthesis, motorcycle travel writing, and endurance-athleticism. He didn't fit standard rock drummer categories, yet is almost certainly your favorite drummer's favorite drummer.

But Rush's touring schedule and crew provided scaffolding: a band structure that gave him decades of stability, creative partners who valued his integrative thinking, and institutional support (management, record labels, tour infrastructure) that allowed his full capacity to flourish. The result wasn't just commercial success—it was generational influence across music, literature, and intellectual culture. Peart didn't reduce himself. He found a structure that could hold his complexity and fairly compensate for it.

Steve Silberman's NeuroTribes documents similar patterns across autism and the history of neurodiversity. The British aristocratic families who unknowingly provided scaffolding- financial stability, social tolerance for eccentricity, access to libraries and laboratories- produced some of history's most impactful polymaths.

Henry Cavendish, for instance, revolutionized chemistry and physics not because aristocracy made him brilliant, but because family wealth gave him the scaffolding to pursue complex, interdisciplinary work without economic pressure to reduce himself into marketable categories. The same pattern appears across Silberman's case studies: when neurodivergent, polymathic minds find scaffolding (whether through family resources, institutional roles, or collaborative structures), they generate outsized value and receive recognition proportional to their contribution.

The lesson is unavoidable: The difference between polymathic failure and polymathic success often isn't intelligence, work ethic, or even output quality. It's whether adequate scaffolding exists—and whether that scaffolding comes with fair compensation.

This isn't personal failure. It's structural.

The economy is set up to recognize and compensate value in specific categories:

• Academic credentials (professorship, tenure)

• Executive roles (salary tiers based on position)

• Consulting (billable hours for expert advice)

• Credentialed expertise (law, medicine, engineering)

• Entertainment and media (publishers, platforms, studios)

Scaffolding-needy polymaths often don't fit these categories.

If you generate value through:

• Open-source knowledge sharing (Quora)

• Systems frameworks that cross domains

• Mentoring relationships

• Teaching that doesn't fit academic structures

• Visual and conceptual synthesis

• Integrative thinking that doesn't fit professional silos

...the economy has almost no mechanism to compensate you.

You're generating enormous value. And the system has no box to put you in.

So you either:

1. Reduce yourself to fit a box (and lose the very complexity that makes you valuable)

2. Stay outside the boxes (and struggle for compensation despite generating value)

3. Find institutions willing to build custom structures (rare and difficult to find).

4. Luck into enough privilege or be highly interested in a highly compensated category.

I didn't hit basic economic stability until my late 50s, after decades of generating value that the world captures for free or underpaid.

Years of:

• Coaching for minimal compensation

• Writing for platforms that profited while I didn't

• Developing frameworks that informed organizations that didn't compensate me

• Teaching that changed lives while I struggled for resources

I was fortunate. I had a father with resources. I had the privilege. I survived decades of economic instability that would have broken many others.

And then, at 57, I finally found a role (grant operations) that:

• Paid adequately for the first time

• Allowed me to use my full capacity

• It was structured in a way that my polymathic thinking was valued

But this is the exception, not the rule.

Most brilliant minds outside the Goldilocks Zone don't get this break.

They either:

• Compromise their brilliance to fit a compensated role (losing the very thing that makes them valuable)

• Stay outside and struggle financially (while generating enormous uncompensated value)

• Break under the pressure of unmet needs (for scaffolding and for adequate compensation)

Here's what I want to name clearly:

Society is failing brilliant people on two fronts simultaneously:

First: We don't provide adequate scaffolding (the spillway problem from Part 2). We let the psychological pressure build. We create the conditions for breakdown.

Second: We don't compensate for the value they generate. We capture their output. We extract the value they create. We call it "contribution" while systematically underpaying them.

These aren't separate problems. They're connected.

The person who doesn't have adequate scaffolding is desperate. They'll take any work that partially addresses the pressure. They'll work for inadequate compensation to have some outlet.

The economy knows this. So it offers: partial outlets, inadequate compensation, and a demand to reduce complexity.

And the brilliant person, under pressure and desperate, accepts.

This is an extraction dressed up as an opportunity.

The demand to "make it simpler" isn't neutral. It's cultural colonization of complexity.

It's saying: "Your way of thinking doesn't fit our commodity structures. Reduce yourself."

For polymathic, neurodivergent, integrative thinkers, this is fundamentally violent. It requires amputating your actual cognitive capacity.

And when you do amputate yourself—when you reduce to fit legible categories—you stop generating the very value that makes you uniquely valuable.

You become cheaper to compensate, easier to manage, and less threatening to institutions.

And your actual brilliance goes underground.

My father found a path: fit institutional structures, find roles with prestige and compensation, convert capacity into wealth.

It's not that he reduced himself. He found institutions willing to hold his complexity. And institutions willing to pay for it.

Most polymaths don't find this. They find:

• Institutions that want them to reduce themselves

• Compensation structures that don't recognize their value

• Pressure to fragment across partial outlets

• Slow economic drain over decades

The lucky ones (like I eventually did) find or create structures that work.

But the pattern for most is: generate enormous value, receive inadequate compensation, live with economic instability despite intellectual abundance.

This isn't just a problem for brilliant people. This is a problem for all of us.

Because the value being extracted—the intellectual output, the systems thinking, the integrative frameworks—that's value we all need.

The Millennium Problems. The organizational dysfunction. The inability to solve civilizational challenges. These aren't failures of insufficient brilliance.

They're failures of extraction economics: we're not building structures that allow brilliant people to contribute and be fully compensated.

We're leaving intellectual value on the table. We're destroying the very minds that could help us solve our most significant problems. And we're doing it while underpaying them.

Institutions can continue:

• Demanding that brilliant people reduce themselves

• Capturing their output while underpaying them

• Creating the conditions for breakdown (unmet scaffolding + unmet compensation)

• Blaming the individuals when they break

Or they can choose something different:

• Building scaffolding for polymath, neurodivergent, integrative minds

• Compensating fairly for the value these minds generate

• Creating space for complexity instead of demanding reduction

• Recognizing that the minds that don't fit standard categories are often the ones most needed

In Part 5, I'll talk about what becomes possible at 57 when you finally have both adequate scaffolding and adequate compensation.

I'll talk about integration. About wholeness. About what it looks like to finally express yourself fully.

And I'll talk about what we owe each other—not just as individuals, but as a society.

Because the exocortex isn't just about productivity, it's about justice.

And the spillway isn't just about pressure relief. It's about recognizing that brilliant minds need infrastructure, that infrastructure needs to be recognized as legitimate, and that the value generated needs to be compensated fairly.

Until then, we're just extracting brilliance and calling it contribution.

The change starts when we stop accepting that trade.

Continue to Part 5: Integration at 57 — What Wholeness Looks Like, and What We Owe Each Other →