The Smartest Person In The Room Is Usually The One With The Homemade Haircut, $5 Watch And Stained Shirt

Some year ago, I was flying to Hawaii for business, seated next to a ABC executive with a wealth of experience in broadcasting. As she was regaling me with inside baseball stories about stars, their tantrums, rivalries and compensation demands, the conversation somehow turned to physics.

Specifically to her son, an MIT trained physicist then deeply engaged in top secret projects for NASA. But then the discusson sequed again from the science of her son's career to his social behavior. Clearly a genius intellectually, he was akin to an awkward adolescent socially.

"I try to visit him once a month," my traveling companion said. "If I dont go, we'll lose touch completely. Not because he doesnt love me, he does, but it's that he gets so absorbed in his work (it's been this way all of his life) that he loses track of the very things he's so intensely smart about: time and space.

"Each visit I give him $250 for 'extra' spending money. But the crazy thing of it is, the last $250 is always in tact when I visit again. Not a dime is spent. He won't even buy a decent shirt or pair of slacks and he won't let me buy him anything tangible. What's more, I always bring a comb because his hair is so unruly, it looks as if he just walked out of the Yukon wilderness. In my world, he'd never be hired. But in the land of the brainiacs, no one cares a whit."

Nothing is universal or absolute, of course, but the fact is, terribly smart people are often so absorbed in their work, that the they never give a thought to how they look, the cut of their jib, the style of a watch. Mark Zuckerberg's T-shirt and what appears to be a do-it-yourself haircut is not a costume. Not at all. He's always been too focused on his complex work, on the algorythms in his head, to waste time on social affectations.

The paradoxical thing is that when we walk into a meeting, the natural (for most of us) tendency is to evaluate the standing of the players by the way they adorn themselves as opposed to the way they think. And, in fact, teachers tend to evaluate students by their level of social interaction: those who speak the most, raise their hands profusely and initiate discussions are praised while their contemplative counterparts are admonished to "snap out of it."

My firm has represented leading quant funds. New employees are top mathematicians and physicists from around the world. Because the fund managers are built from the same DNA, they know better than to play the standard looks and personality game. Those new would-be team members are told to go into a small office, work intensely on a strategy, talk to no one if you like, sleep on the floor if it suits you (as it often does) and come out in three years or so when you have a strategy that appears ready to market test.

None of these people will be hits on dating sites or the life any party. But much like most of the billionaires in the Valley, they get plenty of time to catch up and then fly ahead of the curve.