This post biases way too hard into the nurture side of the equation. The difference between the author and someone who is genuinely smart is that the genuinely smart don't need to spend months carefully working through all those prerequisites in carefully arranged order. Until you meet somebody like this, it's easy to delude yourself into assigning yourself more brilliance than you posses and think that everybody struggles the same way. It turns out some people really are smarter than you, prerequisites or not.