I consider myself to be a slow-thinker too. I have several above-average people as friends. New stuff (usually some mathematical topic) that takes me a whole day to internalize the basics, I can tell to them in 15 minutes and they will be able to understand it and to immediately connect it with other topics they know. I have not attended a special school for mathematically gifted like some of them. In school and during my first year at the university, I used to think that I am just intelligent enough to have an idea how true intellegent one could be...

I was always bad at solving equations with more than 3 unknowns, since this includes enough steps to have a significant probability that I forget a sign or mix something up - even though the algorithm itself was completely clear to me.

Today I acceppted myself much more: I think my real advantages are that I am a) interested in a lot of things and b) I am enduring in reading about a topic. Even if I need to read explanations of 5 different authors to grasp something, I do so. And I care much less today than ealier. However, I still like to be faster at times.

While I think I am a decent programmer/SWE, I do not like pair programming. My path of coding is not linear and most of the stuff I type will be erased until I am confident about my solution.

And getting enough sleep is also a big issue.