I am blown away sometimes with the sheer intelligence of the people I've met or worked with.
image copyright memorex or successors, or whomever.
Examples: Glenn Seaborg (discoverer of Pu, element named after him, NRC chairman, Nobel Prize winner '51, and lots of etc,etc.)
- met him at a book signing, just wish I had my shit together at the age of 35 as much as he had at 85.
One of my colleagues pulled a lot of information out of a carefully designed experiment with minimal data (there wasn't going to be much data to go by, so the experimental design was key).
Another of my colleagues had a brilliant idea, that I (in the same field as I) on the removal of a decay chain (and associated radioactivity) by the removal of a key part of that chain.
I was barely able to keep up.
At one job, if I got stumped, I'd travel down the hallway asking colleagues for the answer to a question and often the answer was Yep, wrote up a paper X years ago, here you go.
I'm not dumb (BS, MS, chemistry) but sometimes it is cool (if humbling) to realize I'm NOT at the end of the IQ bell curve.
I'm also glad that I'm not at the other end of the bell curve, as I have family (uncle) who was institutionalized due to that. Luck happens.