They don't stay hot forever, though. They eventually grow old and wrinkly and gray and sick. You could argue that they're still hot that way, but most people will choose the young hot person over the old hot person.

That's what it's saying that "when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you." I.e. you will start to lose that beauty in many different ways, no matter how desperately you try to hold on to it, with plastic surgery, spending all your time in the gym, etc, and you will no longer be able to win your internal game of being more beautiful than others that you valued so much, before you have died (unless you die young, then... I guess you win, if you call that a victory).

And for intelligence, a common saying is "The more I know, the more I realize I don't know". An intelligent person will just see more and more out there they could be learning and aren't, or don't understand and want to, and no matter how accomplished or smart they are, they can probably always find someone smarter and have used their intelligence more effectively over the years.

There's a game designer named Chris Crawford, for instance. Really smart guy, designed some classic games in the early Mac years and worked for Atari way back in the early days. But at one point he left the game industry because he saw it going the wrong direction for interactive storytelling and started building a storytelling game engine called Storytron that was super ambitious, could tell dynamic cinematic stories and was super complicated. He started building that about 26 years ago now. It still isn't built. I'll let him use his own words:

"In 1992 I dedicated myself to the task of making games that centered on character interaction. It was about then that I settled on the term “interactive storytelling” to describe my efforts. This was long before anybody else was thinking along such lines (although Brenda Laurel had speculated about drama in games a few years earlier). I remember how my friends in the games industry told me that I was absolutely crazy to pursue this line of development -- nobody was interested in stories in games. I know this is difficult to believe now that everybody is talking stories, but it really was the case that, in the early 90s, nobody thought that stories had any place in games. The biggest hit of that time was Doom, and the team that developed it had famously split apart over a dispute regarding the role of story. The winning faction insisted that “we don’t need no stinking story -- action is all that matters”. The rest of the games industry applauded their clarity of thinking. Stories were for wimps.

As the years rolled by, I pursued my lonely quest, picking up a few like-minded idealists along the way. With little financing, it was slow, painful going. We made a major push starting in 2007, but in the summer of 2009 it became clear that we had failed to garner any support. I put Storytron into a coma and contemplated my future.

Thus, when my sixtieth birthday struck, I found myself bereft of achievement in my most important undertaking. I have always felt a calm self-assurance that I am right, that I have developed ideas that would surely conquer the world if I only gave the world enough time to recognize them. My sixtieth birthday shouted loudly that my ideas had most definitely failed to conquer the world. It certainly looks as if I am a washed-up failure. I don’t really believe that -- I still believe that I’ve hit upon a solid approach to interactive storytelling and that someday the world will appreciate my work. But with each passing day the evidence of my failure mounts."

In fact, on that same link, he downplays his own intelligence by comparing himself to others, exactly what I was just arguing: "I do not consider myself particularly intelligent; I have known some real geniuses and the feeling of utter inferiority I feel in their presence drives home the mediocrity of my own intelligence."

I feel he's being too modest. I've read a lot of his writings and feel that he's a super smart guy and I've learned a lot from him. But here he is seeing other smarter people out there and comparing himself to him and finding himself coming up short.

I also think I'm pretty smart, at least in some respects, and used to value that over just about everything else. But eventually you don't find the success you thought you would, or all that learning doesn't lead to breakthroughs or opportunities you thought it would, or you spend your time on dead ends, sometimes out of necessity, sometimes by taking a chance on something and failing, and that's when 'worshipping' intelligence will fail you.

Source: http://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/sixty.html