Nerding often arises after grounding. You pick up a subject because you need it for stuff, and then you find some aspect of it fascinating and you're just kinda hooked.

trust is a polarizing strategy, and it's one that is important to apply early on in the relationship before someone becomes important to you. If you trust someone excessively and it goes badly, but they don't matter to you, you can just kick them to the curb. In general, trusting someone at a level that seems slightly excessive for their level of importance to you will help you sort people in your life who you want to be more important to you than they are from those who you want to be less important than they are.

It is much easier to make people who you already trust important to you than it is to learn to trust people who are already important to you.

Having people who are important to you but whom you don't trust is a very bad thing. Your life becomes unsafe, and you are constantly hiding from them, worrying about how they will use their power against you if they discover your secret.

Ideas are high leverage agents. They become more so when arranged in highly cross-referenced networks. The only tool we have available that is capable of both creating and accessing these networks on demand is the human brain.