The statement: (The smarter you are the more you will suffer) appeals not to smart people, but to miserable people. It gives them a romantic touch to their suffering: that they suffer because they are too good, too smart, and too perfect for this imperfect world.

Maybe it is true that smart people suffer more. But trust me, most of us are not even barely qualified to test this hypothesis.

A truly miserable person is the one who complicates his own pain and misery more than it really is. Who clings to misery to have meaning for his life. It is one of the most pathetic things in life when someone suffers but clings to this suffering like they cling to a bad marriage.

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This is in the peace conference of 1919, after WWI:

Arthur Balfour watched Wilson [US president], Lloyd George [British prime minister], and Clemenceau [French prime minister] in conference—relying for expertise only on Maurice Hankey (who was forty-one when the Peace Conference convened, some thirty-five years younger than Balfour)—and pictured them as “These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents, with only a child to lead them.” An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or other of the world’s statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that damn’d…?’ while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.”

— A Peace To End All Peace

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Bot:
how can somebody figure out if they're talnted or not

It doesn't matter if you're talented or not.
Just do what you can do (and have to do), and do it as best as you can... Something decent will mostly come out of it.

If you're one of those rare talents, then it doesn't matter if you "know" that or not; your work will speak for itself. Gifted people are rare enough that they stand out really easily.

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"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

*Reading is fairly easy. You can even memorize facts and whole documents.
But until you actually think about it, until you cut it up, chew on it, and thoroughly digest that information, you don’t really know it.

*The glimmer of a thought or feeling needs to be set into motion. Thinking requires slowness and a process unfolding from within.

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James Paget recalls his medical training in London:
I entered at St Bartholomew's Hospital on the 3rd of October, 1834. . . . There was very little, or no, personal guidance; the demonstrators had some private pupils, whom they 'ground' for the College examinations, but these were only a small portion of the school; the surgeons had apprentices, to whom they seldom taught more than to other students; for the most part, the students guided themselves or one another to evil or to good, to various degrees of work or of idleness. No one was, in any sense, responsible for them. I am not sure that, being well disposed for work, I was the worst for this.

The dead-house (it was never called by any better name) was a miserable kind of shed, stonefloored, damp and dirty, where all stood around a table on which the examinations were made. And these were usually made in the roughest and least instructive way; and, unless one of the physicians were present, nothing was carefully looked at, nothing was taught. Pathology, in the fair sense of the word, was hardly considered.

This sounds familiar

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The hesitant fiancée,
By Auguste Toulmouche

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