I'm not that brilliant, but I gave up on chess myself at around 18 when I crossed the threshold of playing blind and not being able to fall asleep at night because I was replaying games in my head. I think there are plenty of indicators that a more brilliant mind would take as clues of navigating to some local intellectual optimum. :-)

Only now I'm twice that age I follow a bit of the tournaments again. Watching a banter chess episode by Jan Gustafsson is a nice way to end the day so now and then.

I think the best we can do for brilliant minds is "set them" on a path of applied math (like working on AI). I'll assume that a brilliant mind is able to pick problems that it considers solvable. Even a brilliant mind trying to solve Ramsey number R(6,6) will probably solve a lot of subproblems on the way.