I realised early in life, even in the family home, that there were much cleverer people than me. (Commenters, please fill in your own jokes here.) But I also realised that intelligence wasn’t static.

When people say “X is brilliant”, based on his university degree aged 21, it’s a meaningless statement — X may not have developed since then. You can make yourself more intelligent. One way is to study people with beautiful minds. Here are some of their habits:

? They treat every situation as a learning opportunity. If you fall into conversation with one of them, no matter how low status or stupid you are, they will absorb what you say. They won’t try to “win” the encounter by hitting you with jargon, titles, name-dropping or recitations of stuff they thought up years before.