Before I read the article, I thought the “bus ticket” was referencing William Sidis, who in the early 20th century gave a mathematics lecture at MIT at 10, a Harvard student at 11, was expected to revolutionize math but then dropped out of the public eye to write strange books, one being an etymology of train and bus tickets across the US, collecting several thousand unique stubs. I bet that you could learn a lot about the flow of ideas and culture in the US from such a strange artifact, and while I agree with much of what PG says here, his definition of utility leans towards the economic sense.
Also of note, Knuth has a section on his website devoted to photos of traffic signs!
With that strong endorsement I began going through the whole back-catalog of The Memory Palace, and Episode 36, dated January 7, 2011, “six scenes from the life of william james sidis, wonderful boy”, talks about Sidis' obsession with bus tickets. Or maybe more precisely, streetcar transfers.
I think it said he figured out ways to traverse great distances on a single fare by connecting transfers. That kind of graph traversal thinking strikes me as ahead of its time for the age of streetcars, and could plausibly have led to some interesting places.
I've been fascinated by Sidis in the past, yet never really got his transfer ticket fascination. Maybe because I've been steeped in graph theory for the last couple of years but listening to that episode made me realize the beauty of what he saw.
If this written/possible (is it?) today, no doubt we'd have web pages and youtube channels devoted to "Transfer Surfing".
Glad to hear it. The Memory Palace is one of the most interesting podcasts on my (extensive) list. It's beautifully produced and wonderfully idiosyncratic in its choice of subjects.
The father of William was Boris Sidis. Wikipedia notes Boris:
“sought to provide insight into why people behave as they do, particularly in cases of a mob frenzy or religious mania. With the publication of his book Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure in 1922, he summarized much of his previous work in diagnosing, understanding and treating nervous disorders. He saw fear as an underlying cause of much human mental suffering and problematic behavior.”
> his definition of utility leans towards the economic sense.
I think his preference is probably closer to the generality and “interestingness” of the discovery.
Darwin’s theory is obviously very general and applicable in a multitude of domains in addition to the original one he worked on. Although Ramanujan’s series were not obviously general but they imply some deep mathematical patterns that are more general than specific forms. Neither had much economic utility during the discoverer’s lifetime.
A reasonable conclusion. What is perceived as society turning its back on you and betraying you, has a tendency to generate the same in return - especially in people who have a tendency to see more in things than the average person.
Somewhat similar stories with eg Grothendieck and Kaczynski. As the article points out, one of the properties of genius is that it can’t really be deliberately focused.
I think future generations will see our inability to provide opportunity to genius to rise up as a criminal waste of potential. I sometimes idly speculate how different human society would be if we raised our offspring communally, with every child given the same (high) opportunity to express their capabilities.
> one of the properties of genius is that it can’t really be deliberately focused
i think this is true. I think there is a statement that is a bit more crisp, genius focuses intensely on what it must.
I, an average person, can focus or not on whatever. perhaps i'm a genius. I'm not a fool, but i'm also not pushing the boundaries. Your phrasing gives me room to think i'm a genius. (i'm not).
Some folks, on the other hand, get hung up on details. And to those details matter a lot. They don't have a choice, in much the same way i don't have a choice about breathing. I'll do it if i want to or not. Genius is obsession. sometimes that obsession leads somewhere and we all benefit. but usually, it's just crazy guy ranting about squirrels.
I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all. And as someone who has obsessive interests in a lot of things (some “useful”, some not), that seems really odd to me: how can you just be satisfied to go to work, come home, watch TV, and go to bed each day? (Not saying that’s the wrong way to live, just saying it is surprising to someone who isn’t that way). But I guess the obsessive ones are really the weird ones in society, in terms of the fraction of the population they constitute.
My problem lately has been acquiring enough free time to be obsessive. I really miss the days of playing piano for 12 hours straight or tinkering around with reverse engineering the OS of some MP3 player. And my wife is pregnant for the first time, so like PG mentions, I wonder (but suspect) how that is going to change things. I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done.
Frankly most people obsess about things like finding a mate, playing video games, collecting comics, politics, reading books, watching & discussing TV shows & movies, social websites (such as this one), sex, porn, fashion, sports, the social politics of work (as opposed to the work itself -- e.g. "The Office") and, of course, their kids. But none of these sorts of obsessions are likely to lead to fame or fortune.
I think it is the rare person who literally has no obsessive interests at all. Sounds rather sad and boring.
Interests aren't necessarily obsessions or passions.
I think it's rare to be obsessed with any of those things, but common to be superficially interested. For instance many people will just watch a TV show and enjoy it, and maybe even rewatch it a few times, without knowing all of the actors or writers or how the production of the show worked, etc etc, while you would expect an obsessed person to know at least some of these things, because they are compelled to find out at much as they possibly can about the object of their obsession.
Yeah that’s a good point. Almost everyone watches TV. But people like say Jimmy Kimmel watched TV so closely that they came to understand its underlying mechanisms.
What makes people laugh? What entertains them and makes them less lonely? Who are the important people in the business? You could watch TV for years and never ask yourself those questions.
After all there’s no real school for TV. Many people on TV now studied it by simply paying closer attention. There are LA insiders for sure who can watch their parents, but there are also people like Letterman who was from a small town in Indiana.
As another example, a lot of UFC fighters also grew up watching the nascent sport in the 90’s. They learned how it worked simply by paying more attention, practicing, and being more obsessive about it than the millions of other fans. There’s no school for it since it was a rapidly developing martial art. YouTube has apparently permanently changed the state of practice in Jiu-Jitsu.
I think its fairly common for teenagers (and some not-teenagers) to be obsessed with sex. Many people seem to be obsessed with politics. I've met many adults who I assume are obsessed with work since they spend so much time doing it.
Many of my relatives seem to have no interests or hobbies. I mean sure, they watch TV and movies, but it's not like they are deeply interested in them, they serve more as pastimes. They don't have anything they are actually passionate about.
> The possibility exists that I could just be a bad interviewer though.
Making small talk with people I have this thought constantly. Is the format of small talk what's preventing us from having a discussion about what you're passionate about or do they lack a passion?
You’ve just listed off a dozen obsessive interests, and that’s the problem — you can’t have a dozen obsessive interests, there’s only enough room for one.
When I was twenty I could afford an obsessive interest in my studies. Now I’m in my late thirties I simply have too much going on.
On the upside, when I’m sixty (which is peak bus ticket collecting age) I can see how I will, finally free of the constraints of work and children, finally have time to obsess again. I hope I still have the mental agility to do it well, and that I don’t get sucked into some bus ticket vortex.
> I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all.
I am not convinced that this is true. I think a lot more people are really interested or passionate about something than you may realize, but not all of them talk about those things to everyone. Alternatively, their passion might be what they do for a living.
So for instance a case of the former might be someone that has a very niche interest, so they have learned that in most cases talking about that thing does not lead to any interesting conversations.
Another possibility is that they might not view themselves as being particularly good at their area of interest (which may or may not be the case), so they don’t like to talk about it.
So for whatever reason, including the above or other reasons, you end up not learning about these interests that those people have when you just talk casually with them.
And as for the people that do it for a living, it could be that they have no interests outside of work, because work fulfills their passion. For example someone who is a really passionate salesperson, if they already truly derive meaning and joy from doing what they do at work, maybe they don’t need anything outside of work other than to relax and recover.
Lastly, another group of people I can think of are those that have interests that are very costly and they don’t have a high paying job. So most of the year they spend a lot of time at work and on the spare time they sit in front of the TV, or the computer and it sounds like they have no passion for anything but really they are spending a lot of time dreaming about the next trip they can afford to go on in the Himalayas or whatever, and when they sit at home they watch programs about skiing, and they read about skiing online and discuss it with others online, and maybe read magazines about it as well.
I’m not saying that everyone has something that they are deeply interested in, but I believe that more people do than one might realize.
I can vouch for the "do it for a living" route. Spent almost ten years obsessively tinkering with electronics. Started a career in electronics. Pretty much abandoned hobby electronics; I do it all day at work, get my enjoyment, and pursue more casual interests for fun. Although life still gets empty if it's just work/eat/sleep.
I have a hard time agreeing with this. In my experience people's single most interesting thing to talk about is themselves. Once you notice that, you see it everywhere. It's such a lure, it's almost irresistible. I've made it a habit to ask them a couple of open questions and then just let them have at it. In a few situations folks lost business with me simply because they were too preoccupied with talking about themselves to simply ask "so... how about you? what do you do?"
It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.
I don't think it follows. Obsession about a niche topic + good social sense = you're not likely to mention it during random conversations with regular people.
When you ask me open ended question and I am able to talk about that topic, I will talk about that topic. If people ask me about family I talk about family, if people ask me about work I talk about work and if they ask me about sport I talk about sport.
It has nothing to do with what I find most interesting to talk about. It has to do with me assuming that this is what you want to talk about, since you asked about it.
I also kind of expect the person I talk to make own pronouncements about the topic they started, without having to ask "what about you". When I am asking "what about you", it is usually admission that this is not going well, conversation feels one sided and I am desperately trying to make it two sided so I am not the asshole there.
People answering questions does not imply that their favorite thing to talk about is themselves. It’s simply an easy venue to conversation when you don’t know the other person.
You'll come up for air around 3 and minor hobbies will re-emerge around 5. I would recommend finding some deeply informed and interesting podcasts on subjects you expect to be helpful in order to educate yourself passively during the early years.
My twins are 6 months. I've maintained 3x a week, hour long full body training sessions the entire time (and I get out for 2-3 10k runs a week and occasionally get out for a mountain bike ride, depending on how good of a deal I can make with my wife). I'm fortunate to work from home full-time, which means that I can get my workout in over lunch hour.
For people who aren't are so fortunate, I always recommend that they look into Kettlebell Simple & Sinister on Amazon from Pavel Tsatsouline (there's a new version, recently released, easy to read and very dense with information and incredible strength training insights).
Simple & Sinister is essentially a 20 minute, no nonsense, 100% legitimate strength training routine that can be done daily, even in combination with other training programs and workouts. Kettlebells take up essentially no space and if you buy a reputable brand you will have this strength training implement for the rest of your life.
For what it's worth, that means that you're actually at an easier phase than you will be when the kids get older. Infants are time-consuming in many ways, but they also sleep a lot and have few external needs of their own.
When your kids stopping napping and start acquiring their own friends and activities, the time commitment goes up a lot, especially when they are still too young to do much for themselves.
Elementary age sort of plateaus: the amount of activities goes up, but they can take care of more of their own maintainance too. I don't know what middle school is like yet, but my hunch is that the time commitment starts going down when they become old enough to go to activities on their own.
Oh, for sure. It's already ramped up, month over month, just due to them napping less. I'm excited to see where it all takes us over the coming years. That said, a major factor in why I work full-time remote today is because I wanted to take control of my health and use my lunch hour to exercise. I don't plan on ever giving that up, but I know that's optimistic. I'd happily go back to S&S 6 days a week if that's where my life took me (again).
How do you handle progressive overload? Do you have a bunch of different kettlebells of various weights? Seems like that would defeat the space savings. Or do you cycle out the lower weights or put them in storage once you've progressed past them? Curious to see if I could make this work for me, as I also have time/space constraints.
This program "only" consists of 2 movements, the kettlebell swing and the turkish get-up. But it's deceptively challenging. Progressive overload with S&S is mainly in building up the swings and in perfecting the form of the TGU. Once you have mastery with a kettlebell of a certain size, you test yourself and move up to the next size. It used to have time requirements, in version 1, but that has been removed in the latest iteration.
Kettlebells, traditionally, jump in 4kg increments. So, on average, with this program, you start with a single 16kg kettlebell, and then move to a 20kg, on up to 32kg.
I have a lot of kettlebells... 2x12kg, 2x16kg, 2x20kg, 1x24kg, 1x28kg, 1x32kg, 1x36kg, 1x40kg. They have a small footprint. I leave them all in a corner in the garage and they take up very little space, maybe 3 square feet. I'm on a different (non-kettlebell) program right now. But, I am using the 32kg on days that are not my main training days for strength-endurance purposes (I like doing between 300 and 500 heavy swings a week).
Sorry for the brevity, but I wanted to respond. Hope it helps.
Simplest solution: if the traffic situation around you allows it get a bike. And use it for anything under 10 km or when you need to transport something heavy. Cheaper than the gym and far healthier, saves you money on w&t on your car as well.
Yeah, I commuted by bike until we had kids. Sadly, the preschool that we liked the most also wasn't easily bikable from the house. The kids now go to a school that is easily bikable, and it's a joy.
I do that now because I'm fortunate enough to live very close to work, but that can be really difficult for parents. If your commute time is too long then commute + work + commute can end up a longer span of time than the gap between breakfast and dinner for the kids. When I lived farther, I drove because that mattered more to me than missing meals with them.
What separates piano and OS hscking from making dinner, for you? What is mundane versus interesting?
It seems to reduce the problem back to what might lead to a useful discovery versus what won't. But piano is likely in the latter category, given that its obsessed about so often over centuries. Maybe the time for OS hacking to lead to discoveries is on its way out, as well.
Obsessive cooking might be more likely to be fruitful, come to think of it. We have changing ideas about food production and nutrition; and more enabling technologies around for new ideas.
(I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with obsessing about things that won't lead to discoveries. They could be useful in a more mundane way, or be useless but still engaging.)
I think that's the whole point. It's not about what is interesting and what not, but what truly obsesses you. What OP means is that cooking is not something he feels obsessed about. It's great if you are obsessed about cooking and have 10 hours a day to practice your cooking. But most of us, wish we had more time to explore the topics we are deeply attracted to. If they make a difference, all the better.
Manufacturing fascination is a hard mental task, doubly so if you try to do it to find a substitute for something you're already fascinated in, but can't find time to pursue - you'll know you're trying to cheat yourself.
I highly recommend going obsessive with cooking. It pays dividends when you can cook at home and eat like a king.
I found playing with Heston Blumenthal recipes and then diving into as many cook books as possible to be the best way to start.
Your fear is valid.
One way I solved it (partly) is to hire help. Use your financial comfort to buy back your own time by paying someone else to do chores like cleaning, dishes etc.
And the 1-2 hours per day that you'll save, now you can spend with your kid and/or on your interests.
> I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done.
You just articulated my worst fear, occasionally some aspect of it creeps into my life when society demands some "busy work" from me... each time it makes me feel like wanting to retreat into the wilderness to escape from society and enjoy nature and do things I actually find interesting.
oh absolutely, for prolonged escape if you don't take the basic technology of modern civilization with you, you will loose all your time again to keeping yourself clean, clothed, warm and fed. I you really want to escape I think the trick must be to live just close enough to reap the benefits of modern industry - but for me it is merely a desire or maybe a fantasy that seems more attractive on some days than others.
You can go to some small village in south America. Live on a beach or in mountains. It's so cheap that all you basic needs can be taken care of with 100-400$/month and you can dedicate yourself to the persuit of your hobby.
I think it'd be more accurate to say that most people haven't yet found something to be obsessively interested in.
Although the child prodigy is a popular image, I don't actually know anyone who's ended up doing the same thing all their life since they were young. People bounce around a lot before they hit something that clicks. Sometimes it's at 15, sometimes it's at 50.
Even people who have obsessive interests today first went through their boring phases, too.
Work part-time? I get 1-2 days off per week for projects (and house stuff) then in the evenings/weekends I actually have time and energy for playing with my child.
Plus, it's better for the environment than more work, more consumption.
FWIW, making to-do list is often a way of coping with inability to focus and hold coherent thoughts for longer periods of time in one's head. At least that's how I do this - especially now that I have a kid. I jot down lots of random throwaway todo lists for the day or week; otherwise, between the job, family and unwinding on HN, I'd essentially never do anything other than daily chores and "firefighting".
It’s not that bad. I just had twin girls and I’m still managing to draw for ~3 hours a day in between feeding and diaper changes. If you like your hobby enough you’ll find the energy and time somewhere ;P
I've got a new one too. My guitar follows me all around the house, and I've planted books in a bunch of different places for the in-between time. I'm curious to see how this evolves as the baby gets older.
I'm very new to having a kid but so far I've found it's helped focus my time more efficiently by getting better at multi-tasking, and then the remaining "interests" time is spent with a serious, no-time-to-waste approach.
Also, you might be surprised at what having a kid does to you, in a good way. Like PG mentions in his essay, once people have kids they tend to be their focus, and it's satisfying to guide them and see them grow.
Yeah, kid, family and relationships seems like the basic answer to "why aren't most people obsessed with obscure X".
The chances are your kid will take all your time when they're young and then probably won't share obsessive interest X when they get older.
Just as much with relationships - you can't be an appealing mate by being successful, well-balanced and well-adjusted. Or you can share interest X with you mate. But latter approach gives one 1/10000th as many people - not impossible but it's something to think about.
I think there are some portion of people who could find hobby X appealing but then, consciously or unconsciously think about these considerations and push themselves back to mainstream.
I would also like to say -- having a kid makes one realize how much time is wasted online reading reading reading. It's been a nice adjustment getting away from the internet.
Go look up what the average American or European media consumption is. It's difficult to see it as anything but an obsession. It's just that the obsession relates to things others are producing.
If you don't have time for your obsessive interest, then it's not really obsessive after all. A maximally obsessive person would have neglected distractions from his obsession.
I used to be obsessed with many different things during childhood, perhaps because I am an only child and had large chunks of time where I was in my own room, alone, as a child. I would do things like lay out a paper map of a city, and start tracing my fingers along the roads as if I was a bus driver, or pretending I had multiple estates. I would start documenting the statistics of my Pokemon card deck. Take apart my computer. Spend hours trying to create something significant from random Lego blocks. Make songs by humming into a cassette tape recorder. Even invented a language (very short-lived hobby).
Then puberty hit. I became more interested in making sure my hair and clothes were cool enough, so I could fit in, so I could attract my crush. I became much more addicted into the mainstream grooves of video games, such as League of Legends. I lost interest in random obsessions, and instead replaced it with a more artificial one governed by Riot Games or Blizzard, and the digital points/levels that I got in game.
Then I grew up. I am now working as a software developer, but don't even have much obsession for programming at all. I just don't see how someone can get excited about the intracacies of a programming language, because its so dry and boring. And I feel a bit ashamed for not being too interested in hacking together a MVP anymore, even though programming presents such a huge realm of possibility available to anyone at no barrier/cost to entry. Nowadays, whenever I have a slight interest in anything, the capitalistic worldview has polluted my thoughts by always triggering the thought: "but is this a viable business idea? Could I get recognition from others and provide value such that the market would compensate me?"
I would trade anything to get my childhood obsessions back, because I am living mostly like the repetitive 9-5er you describe.
Read about and in depth how to raise kids. There is a lot of good books how you can let kids become strong individuals instead of good at following instructions.
My trip regarding this has been mostly Swedish content. Like this guy: (Grow, not obey) http://www.larshgustafsson.se/?p=1413 I don't see any of this book translated to English though.
He reflects upon his life as a doctor for mostly kids. How interactions with parents work out. How he hates methods and recipies to handle your kids, since that tends to distance yourself from the kid, use your instinct instead.
Another book I was really fascinated by was "Barn som bråkar" (Kids that fight) by Bo Heijskov: https://eng.hejlskov.se/books/
I think most books are a good read there. Mostly about how nothing can be solved by screaming/shouting/distancing. Accept that kids have their own mechanics that you need to appreciate and tend to. Angry kids are good, that means they love you enough to share their emotions. Now it is up to you as a guardian to control the structure around the kid to make it easier to exist and control itself.
Most likely I have missed tons of authors, but I strongly believe that if one follows the pattern of giving love to kids and not shout at them, things will be much easier, for both parent and kids. Reading about it and discussing it with ones partner is something that needs to be tended to all the time.
For me as a bonus dad/bonus grandad and dad I fill a lot of roles, I tend to do deep dives in all areas (tech, music, philosofy etc), reading more about the roles I fill was such a joy and time consuming.
To be fair I started out reading Bo Heilskov and then the site with soundbooks gave me the others.
1) Your kid will determine how much free time you have. Some infants sleep 22 hours a day. Some sleep 4 hours a day. You can't know which you'll get.
2) Ruthless economizing & prioritizing of what's important to you. Combine activities, e.g. biking to work is commute, exercise, and possibly shower all-in-one.
That seemed an odd thing to include. Making food is a rewarding and intriguing pursuit. It combines aesthetics, science, social benefit and sensual rewards. It has a rich history and tons of controversies to poke at.
I never feel that making dinner is a waste of my time.
I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field.
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
The 'problem' with modern science is that a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered, and new discoveries are most often built on that stuff. I splash around in the backwaters of machine learning, however I have to pick my targets carefully and maintain a very tight focus - the defined knowledge base has already grown to more than anyone can ingest in detail. Given the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed to achieve mastery in a scientific discipline, and the fact that knowledge base keeps growing, it takes longer and longer to lay a foundation for just understanding what the hell people are talking about. Now, there are opportunities, for example the use of genetic algorithms as part of ML solutions, because for any 'real' researcher, GA's aren't the cool kid in the opinions of reviewers or funding agents. It's easier when you are the PI and the funding authority, even if the budget is quite a bit smaller
The problem with modern science is that there is no room for the unusual.
Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout.
Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole.
Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public.
As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah.
So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
There is still plenty of room for the unusual, it just isn't as easy as it was back in the day when most important discoveries were made by people working by themselves at home with little organizational funding.
It's a nice narrative that overgrown institutions are ruthlessly repressing all creativity. And I do believe there is some truth to that. We should work hard to understand why and then improve the situation. However, unfortunately, reality is usually more complex and also more mundane (in some ways) than any nice narratives we can come up with.
From my experiences in the life sciences going through the academic credentialing process (PhD to postdoc), there was room for the unusual but the way it worked was a little convoluted. Basically the grant funding agencies give you money for a project that they can understand and follow your logic on why it will succeed. Then when they fund you, you cut back on the resources required to get to that success and spend the savings on new ideas. The fun part about the "new idea" spending is you can look at most anything that your instrumentation can look for. The idea being all the tools in your lab, your departments lab, even collaborating institutions are available to play around with and probe. You can even build new instrumentation to look at new things with that money. This is how modern life science pushes ahead.
Or the other option is you get funding for an idea that falls within the same realm as your unusual idea. Then you spend the money on those overlapping projects.
A great example is a chemist I knew that love research with selenium (an uncommon element). He was most interested in what role it plays in organic chemistry. That’s it.
But when he wrote up grant proposals it was always about the anti-cancer properties of selenium compounds. Never mind the fact he had zero plans to actually pursues that end.
Nobody's checking. The focus is on what you're going to spend next year's money on, not how you spent last year's money. And if you're savvy, you can use tools that were already bought for some other purpose, or that don't cost much.
Working a day job in industry isn't categorically different, except that someone is probably watching your spending more closely. You have to figure out a way to set aside some time to work on your own interest, whether you do it at work or at home.
As for money, you can get technology made for 1/10 of what it costs your employer, by choosing your battles, cutting out all of the overhead, and using free stuff.
So I moved into industry out of post doc and I can tell you as long as you're getting your day job done and it isn't that expensive you can test most any idea. I'd say it's even easier to do it in industry because "not that expensive" to industry is like 10-fold more than in academia.
It's worse than this. The careerists have taken control and use it to demand you work as they would like. They kill the creativity and passion and will not allow the real work to happen and make progress.
There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back.
Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
> The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven.
I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
800 karma in 73 days. I wonder what the highest karma gain in two months was, in HN’s history. (From comments only, and with the top comment removed from consideration to avoid one-offs.)
I probably should have specified “besides tptacek.” He’s a fascinating outlier. He once claimed he was worried some Russians were going to harm him due to his HN comments. I still wonder if he was just saying that to sound cool, but truth is often strange.
That average does put things into perspective though.
How did you read 'hate' into that? Genuinely curious.
As an aside, I recently feel at odds with the language many people are using. The mere word 'hate' seems to have grown weird political connotations, while is suddenly okay to hate 'hate'. Is this not fostering the very emotion you revile, under twisted pretense? I remember 'love thy enemy' to have been the twist of the knife in peaceful protest, not sinking to their level with 'justified hate'. It feels hollow. If we want a change, we need to reach out first. /rant
There is a trend to demonize the Chinese and Russians governments (it is always about governments but then it translates to companies and then to people). This trend is very useful to promote different kinds of online censorship and put people into political boxes (e.g., you like this then you are that). Basically, when every single piece of material about a country is negative, you get a set of feeling where hate is not the least common. Then you go full paranoia cycle and expect that these same people also will punish you for what you write about them. One can benefit from these tendencies and ride them to get attention and respect of like-minded people, basically sell hate.
I’ve consistently gained karma faster than that. By my estimate, there’s still a handful of people who are currently accumulating karma even faster than I am (one of whom has been mentioned here), though I expect to only really be sure in a year or so.
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.
The people driven by curiosity will still be in those unfashionable backwaters of any field. I would think true progress is made by those individuals, not ones that chase ‘hot’ fields.
Bingo. I would add that the movers tend to define their own fields, and by action and driven by need/practicality, not marketing. Those seeking to enter a career, generally have a different set of goals and priorities, reguardless of overlap.
> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
The average tenured professor salary in the US is $141k. Star research directors with a proven record of bringing in grant money can easily earn two or three times that. In engineering, physics, med, and bio there are also lucrative consultancy opportunities.
The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside.
The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons.
Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders
Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
The big difference is that currently scientists are paid and their research equipment funded by someone else; contrasting to the earlier times where usually you could be a scientist if and only if had "passive income" (usually, inherited wealth), so that you would not need to work to earn money and could instead study (and pay for studies in a world without student loans) and research instead of that.
In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs).
I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB.
The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric company.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
That's one very interesting observation. I've commented in that vein a short while ago where I noticed that once I finally understood what some paper was about my usual response (definitely not always) would be 'That's it?'.
Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.
Wikipedia for certain topic is often just as inscrutable as papers would be. I have no idea why this is, but my guess is that it’s written by people with passing interest in the field who lack the experience to effectively distill their knowledge like paper authors might.
You could not "easily" become a billionaire by improving Wikipedia, which is the result of millions of hours of writing and editing. The fact is most low-hanging fruit has already been plucked, thus every scientific discovery relies upon more and more background knowledge. Yes, we do make innovations in explaining/teaching science more quickly to successive generations, but I doubt if we'll ever see a Newton or Darwin who can single-handedly, obsessively write and observe and calculate, by themselves, and then push science forward by leaps and bounds. The best research today is all done by teams, with experts on statistics, study design, clinicians, hardware experts - there are just so many niche fields that we MUST collaborate on extremely advanced work.
Your advisors were acting in your best interest. There is a time and place for readable science, and your thesis is not it. It has nothing to do with the power of the guild, and everything to do with assessing your knowledge and preparation.
The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field.
There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.
Well, so sorry. If things are as bad as you sketch them then there may as well be a guild.
Science is first and foremost about understanding, and writing in a way that purposefully obfuscates and makes it harder to understand what is communicated is anathema to true science.
You misunderstand the purpose - it's not intentional obfuscation. Its the lingua franca of the field. A technical term can define in one phrase an entire concept that would be tedious to spell out each and every time. It can define one 'chunk' that you can then combine with other chunks to develop deeper understanding. Surely you can agree with that?
While I fully agree that ability to communicate science to the general public is incredibly important, the thesis is not necessary the place for this. Plenty of other places are (blogs, twitter, etc) and this ability is crucial for a publicly funded scientist. General large conferences that I am aware of often encourage non-technical translations of abstracts.
I don't think that's what 'jacquesm is talking about. It's not about the technical term that can communicate a lot of meaning in few characters. It's about constant use of obscure technical phrases that communicate the same or less than a plain-language description, except you have to work to decipher it. It's obfuscation, in a sense similar to what a JS obfuscator does to readable code.
I long for voice, for playful humor, for that je ne sais quoi of good writing! Robert Anton Wilson wrote a marvelous book called Quantum Psychology, where he uses the insights of quantum physics to upend the prevailing Aristotelian view of is / is not logic in psychology and in scientific thinking generally. It was a genuine pleasure to read, as I sensed the intelligent, interested, living being doing the writing all throughout. It felt intimate despite its serious nature. I just don't understand why writing about a scientific subject, even in an obscure and rarified field, gives you a pass on crafting a piece of writing someone might actually want to read, might actually connect with on an emotional level.
You may think there is some rational choice to be made about obsessive curiosity. Maybe not.
In 1960, my mom lived near a six year old who could fix electric stuff. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him and brought him things to fix. TV's were no problem; dead radios were great; telephones were cool. He was a super happy kid with a constant enthusiasm and a sparkle in his eye, running home from school every day to see what he could learn and what neighbors had brought for his help. He had thrown circuit breakers in the house many times. One day, there was a blackout and he came down from his room to apologize to this parents, again. They had an idea and they pointed out the window. "Well you really did it this time. Look, the entire city went down." And that was it. He stopped with electronics.
At first he was morose and anxious, but his parents figured he would get used to his new life. He left for college the same disconnected and subdued kid he became at six. My mom bumped into him again around 1990, when he was about 35, and he never did recover: still sad, puffy, disconnected from people, uninspired, hating his job, unhappy with friends.
That's a great contrast. Yes, Feynman had a thriving business fixing electronics as a kid. Difference: his parents didn't worry that he was going to grow up weird. They were happy with what might have become his bus ticket collecting
No. They meant to stop him from his compulsive interest in electronics. They wanted him to play with other kids, play sports, run around. He seemed weird and they thought he would seem weird when he grew up. And running shop that fixes radios didn't look like success to them. (Until recently, "nerd" was a very offensive insult.)
> (Until recently, "nerd" was a very offensive insult.)
In that sense, perhaps society has made a little progress, in socially embracing those that seem eccentric, quirky or uncomfortable - maybe not always for the right reasons, but it allows more people to be themselves and be happy.
I think it's less of actual progress, and more of economy: what was considered nerdy two decades ago, now is the easiest path to both upper-class and 1%-levels of wealth. People don't hate nerds anymore, they want to be them - not because the topics are interesting, but because they're a good career.
There's certainly some of that, but the long tail of the Internet means there are all sorts of communities and real-life meet ups of the strangest obsessions where their interests are celebrated, not made fun of. This means it's safe to declare your weird obsessions. Even if you're family doesn't understand it, they don't have to - theres a community to connect with, whereas previously there was little/no such ability, and Nerd interests were shunned. Now they're the feature of Comic Con, SDCC, Pax, etc.
Rather, the connotations of the word "nerd" have lessened significantly. In the 60s and 70s, it was like what being called an "incel" is today. It was meant to mark you as unlikeable, unpleasant, unattractive, and pretty much outside of the realm of normal human consideration.
Very dubious that a electronics mini-wizard could not figure by himself that it's impossible to take down the electric city distribution system from your house.
I' vaguely remember confronting my father over a similar issue during my electrical experimental days as a kid, asking him why our house had no adequate protection (those days simple fuses where still normal).
1. The difference between collecting bus tickets, working on mathematics, and figuring the crystallization patterns of snowflakes is virtually nothing. To the people obsessed with it, it is all-important; to outsiders, all three look indistinguishably pointless. Only in retrospect can anyone say whether the activity led to something society considers important. The truly obsessed don't care.
2. Genius is overrated. We like stories of great individuals changing the world with their genius because we like stories and we dislike chance. But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time. Civilization's progress is more a sequence of ideas whose time had come, but we prefer stories of great unique geniuses.
A fantastic book by Vernon Vinge called “A Deepness in the Sky” toys around with this idea a lot actually.
There is a virus that can release neurotoxins and it is flipped in very specific parts of the brain with a MRI-like device. This can elicit a state of “Focus” where the person (victim more like) becomes totally obsessed with a particular idea or subject. They devote all energy towards this subject and can make stunning breakthroughs on difficult topics because they are utterly and completely _obssessed_ with whatever topic they are supposed to be.
They are held captives by their own fascination and work as slaves.
I know this is taking the idea a bit far from the point, but it’s an interesting extension of the idea.
Thank you so much. I read this book when it came out 20 years ago and have been trying to remember what it was called at odd times, On and Off, for roughly the last decade, specifically because of the plot point of the “Focus” virus.
> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time.
Agree and not to mention we don't have any data on people who loved and were obsessive and that did not lead to anything. I am actually surprised in how simplistic PG is when he writes some of what he does. For example he states that Darwin was obsessed (as he was) but ignores that just like the bus ticket collector he most likely did that simply because he was interested or curious for some reason. A hobby or a like is no better than anyone else's. Who is to say watching football matters (it doesn't) or collecting stamps matters (it doesn't) or by the same token if you obsess over mathematics (and it matters and leads to something) that that is why you even did it in the first place?
I would even say that often people are obsessive about what they do not even thinking it will lead to anything. I was an obsessive commenter on a site and most would say I was wasting my time. But that activity has led to over 7 figures of income. But I did it because I enjoyed it (and did it every day). Likewise the same happens here on HN. In one sense you might be wasting your time but if you enjoy it and it leads to something is not genuine to say you did it for another reason.
From time to time mathematicians discover something interesting, like the theoretical bases for elliptic-curve cryptography. I also remember some interesting work with applications to tomography, but it's mostly like a black box so it's more difficult to be sure how aplicable it was.
> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time.
Not just "people" - "geniuses". History shows multiple geniuses were working on it at the same time.
I do agree that we give too much credit to a single genius. Had Isaac Newton not lived, we'd still have calculus, physics, etc in some form or another. The same thing with Einstein, Turing, etc. But that doesn't mean genius is overrated. What's overrated is the hero worshiping narrative we build around a single genius due to racial or nationalistic reasons.
But I think we should have as many geniuses working on problems as possible rather than saying that genius is overrated.
For a long time, the Great Man theory dominated a lot of thinkers. Now there's a lot of pushback on the Great Man theory. I think I like both the theory and the pushback both. Reality's complicated.
You’re completely deluded into believing that genius is overrated. While it is never in isolation, and its fruits are the product of historical necessity, it takes a rare breed of sacrifice, which PG here is saying as obsession, to hit the targets no one else sees (paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer); and is constitutionally the personal, moral input of an individual on choosing how to cause themselves to be, unconcerned with the mediocre concerns of their contemporary society.
Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
> You’re completely deluded [...] Shame on you and your ilk
Crossing into personal attack isn't allowed, and we ban accounts the keep doing it, so can you please not do it here? If you'd take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see how the intended spirit of this site points in the opposite direction. Note that it doesn't depend on how right you are.
I see the reasonings of both of your points. To me it seems in the old days, there was a lot of hindrance in reaching your potential therefore for those few to become geniuses, you truly had to be exceptional and since there was so few, your impact would be tremendous.
Now compare that to the modern day, where I'd say a lot higher percentage of people are hitting their potential as a genius. Therefore, a lot more people are coming up with new novel things, but since a lot of the easy major milestones in sciences have been attained, the impact of those single individual geniuses is much smaller.
Modern age Newton could be just a very good AI researcher from England. It's just impossible for humans to have devolved so much that the genius of the previous generations would be so much different than we have today.
> You’re completely deluded into believing that genius is overrated.
...
> Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
There's a lot of passion in your comment, but it's also really antagonistic. The person you replied to was very respectful and cogent in expressing their point of view; you abandoned that civility quite quickly - and for what?
If you're as well read as your references imply, surely you can appreciate an argument which casts aspersion on the "lone hero" ideation of historical progress.
Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut.
The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."
And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.
Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore.
Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
Hah I haven’t for a couple years but last time I did I was amazed and dismayed at having the sensation that my mind knows what to do, but my fingers just aren’t quick enough. I’d guess if you were a musician or athlete who hadn’t played in awhile it’d feel similar. I end up shutting it off because my brain isn’t entertained by the slow songs and my hands can’t physically keep up with the fast ones that I loved so much, and it’d probably take me a few weeks to get any good again and I’m not willing to put in that kind of time with a family.
It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best.
It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.
Yeah, I remember Nima, and I also remember a similar feeling upon discovering Beatmania. Now that I'm digging into the cobwebs of my memories, I am beginning to recall a game called O2Jam which was essentially a South Korean Beatmania flavored MMO. Very challenging, and it definitely usurped some of the space I was otherwise giving to Stepmania Online. Did you ever get into O2Jam? I think it might even still be around.
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this.
Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word).
Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.
So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.
As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.
Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.
> I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested.
It's interest in the sense of "conflict of interest", not in the sense of finding something fascinating.
I'd almost say "introversion" or "selfishness" is the right term, if the latter weren't so prejudicial. You aren't collecting bus tickets or obsessing over infinite series to advance your own material interests or standing in the external world.
"Disinterest" doesn't work at all in any sense of the term. In the absence of overt mental illness, the bus-ticket collector must see it as being in his best interest to spend his time collecting bus tickets, or he'd do something else instead. ("You are your calendar.") The search for gratification, however externally meaningless, is certainly a valid expression of self-interest.
Put another way, if you would object if you were forcibly stopped from pursuing a goal, then you cannot be described as "disinterested."
[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.
From dictionary.com, the second definition of disinterested is "having no interest in something," but the first is, "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."
You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.
I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.
I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.
The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).
But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.
It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time?
Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.
For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
Flipping light switches is not a competition... I wasn't being literal. I mean a great number of important things in life are competitions even if we don't see ourselves as competitors.
-
But actually I disagree with saying Ramanujan wasn't competing with anyone, he just wasn't trying to compete
Plenty of people would consider any academic field a competition, even if not everyone in the field is there to compete
The competitive nature of the mathematics field easily have to do with why Ramanujan was not taken as seriously as he should have been at first. A "competitor" was coming with claims to grand contributions and that already created friction, which when combined with other factors about his non-traditional presentation became roadblocks.
> If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.
This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.
Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.
See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos
All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.
Trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is doing the same thing like everyone else. Competition might actually force you to come up with a different approach.
Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.
>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners
This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.
This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.
>> it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Why think in black and white ?
We have a lot impact on our lives, but there's also some luck involved, especially if we want to achieve extreme things.
> reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance
Not the sum total of achievement, just a single individual's achievement. An individual's achievement can indeed be attributed ~100% to luck. For every Einstein there are hundreds of equally brilliant geniuses who died picking cotton in a field.
This is why having a social safety net is so important. If society can put a floor under how badly people can lose, they'll feel more free to try low-probability high-payoff endeavors.
This is possibly the greatest argument for social safety nets ever made, really.
The economy of today is so efficient and supply chains are so effective at moving things to people who need them, that it seems incredibly stupid to not use it to provide some kind of basic necessities to every human being, no questions asked.
If the US were to do this today, there would be more innovation, less misery, a supercharged economy as you've increased the purchasing power of millions of people overnight...It a fucking no brainer. And cutting taxes rather than providing more benefits seems like the most stupid way to run a country I've ever seen in my life.
So if you spend 14 hours a day for 5 years on a computer project that becomes useful, and a lot of people want it and pay you for it, you are willing to fork over most of that to the government since they provided you with the basic allowance that let you pursue this project, and your success is how they fund a basic allowance for everyone - you included.
While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.
I guess this could work, but to me, the level of "disinterest" required to be okay with this result is even more rare than genius.
Nobody on the planet has ever gone "oh fuck me I only made 300 million with my extremely successful business instead of 600 million. Well what a waste of time, I shouldn't have ever started it."
No rational person that isn't already well off would take a 1% shot at 1 billion over a 10% shot at 100 million.
Progressive taxation and social safety don't stifle economies, they make them thrive. They act as a negative tax on risk, and create a framework where actors are free to pursue higher EV bets without worrying as much about utility value. Literally the entire point is to create more pie for everyone.
Bludgers getting "free money" is just a side effect. You're not paying for them with your taxes, you're paying into an insurance fund with all the other innovators. Except this fund is +EV, subsidized by all the other countries in the global economy that aren't taking the same gains. You're the one getting the free money, and the leaners are taxing some percentage of that.
The only reason every successful country in the world isn't already doing it is because of this unintuitive "common sense" optic that you (and about a billion others, literally) are propagating: that somehow it breaks the rules of "fairness". The reality is it's got absolutely nothing to do with fairness, it's about maximizing the bottom line, just like in business. Governments don't give a shit about individual people, nor should they (at least not at the expense of society).
Also, I'd guess most first world countries could easily (and do) provide a world class social safety net without going over 50% taxation in any bracket, not even billionaires. Your example only applies if you're talking about taxation in the 70-100% range.
> While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.
Honestly, is this such a bad thing? Why do we incentivize innovation by promising people a basic standard of living? We reward people who take risks with something better than that anyways, so I see no problem with giving people not willing to take those risks something lesser than that “for free”.
> For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost.
For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.
The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.
That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
> That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?
Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.
Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.
Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.
I mostly agree with you but "work ethics" is also partially genetic. It's defined partly by a big five trait called conscientiousness which has a fair percentage of its effects not explainable by the environment or random chance.
Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.
The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
Success (by which most people mean financial success, fame, or winning in some competition) is certainly worshipped.
However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.
I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).
Being better than other hard working people can also involve simply kicking the ladder from underneath you, playing the social status game or making bets at the edge of the law and shoving that risk onto other people.
And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.
Most top athletes have excellent work ethic but they also have natural ability. No amount of work ethic can compensate for lack of natural ability. You absolutely need that to get to the top.
I think pg is trying to argue that passionate disinterest is different from work ethic. For a person like Ronaldo, all of the off-field training might be enjoyable. If it is, then is it really work ethic? Or is it just Ronaldo doing what he wants to do and would be doing anyway, if there were no such thing as money?
Maybe the serial lottery winning is what society subconscious worships.. they know that even with insane amounts of dedications, the others failed when a few particular ones got "lucky".
You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse.
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.
I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.
You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.
I think we are talking about two very different things. I am talking about bus ticket collectors and you are talking about gamers playing pro games giving millions of dollars in prizes.
edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear.
if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests.
Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.
> ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.
The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions?
If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.
It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision.
You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.
Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.
Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.
Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.
So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
> Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go
I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.
There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Being a top chess or go player in modern times necessitates being a child prodigy. The skill gap in chess and go is enormous. I don't think the number of players is the primary indicator of how difficult it is to be at the "top" of an activity.
Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.
The article title contains the word ‘genius’ and it’s about doing ‘great work’. The fact that some people managed to turn their consumption-based entertainment hobby into a financial success really has nothing to do with genius or great work.
Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests
Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.
Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.
Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.
Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.
Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
Einstein's inputs were a bunch of scattered theories about electromagnetism and thermodynamics -- particularly, Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field, and the empirical description of the photoelectric effect, and Planck's description of blackbody radiation.
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
For one, Mercury's orbit was pretty confusing, and needed a fudge factor when calculated with existing Newtonian methods. This is why some were so convinced that there had to be a tiny planet Vulcan between it and the sun. When you use Relativistic equations rather than Newtonian, the math just works out clean without a fudge factor.
I'm always amazed when I'm reminded of the genesis of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Whether you think it sprung solely from his mind or not, the thought experiment is so simple a young child can understand but look at the ramifications which follow. Just remarkable.
Not a physicist, but my understanding (from having glanced at one of Einstein's 1905 papers a long time ago) was that the genesis of SR has a context. Specifically, the following observations bothered Einstein (below are my words, don't think anyone from 1905 would say it this way):
1. Maxwell's equations did not permit information to propagate faster than some finite velocity c, which (for many good reasons) can be identified with the speed of light in vaccuum.
2. Closely related mathemaical fact: Maxwell's equations were Lorentz invariant.
3. On the other hand if one envisioned a charged particle moving in a field, then Newtonian theory says the particle dynamics were galilean invariant.
But the particle and the field really are part of one system, and it would be odd for the two parts to have different symmetry properties, as this would mean for example that when one changes between two coordinate systems their equations of motion would transform in different ways.
I know lots of you know way more physics & history of physics than I. Please jump in!
Person A is on a moving train and tosses a ball into the air of height H. To this person the ball travels a distance of 2H to in a time T to return to his hand.
Person B is beside the tracks and sees the same event. To this person the ball travels 2 * (x^2 + H^2)^1/2, which we'll later call D, in the same time T where x is the distance the train traveled during this time.
Since velocity is a measure distance divided by time the velocity of the ball in Person A's frame of reference is 2H/T (V1). The velocity of the ball in Person B's frame of reference is 2D/T (V2). Obviously V2 is greater because the distance traveled is greater for the same amount of time.
Now suppose instead of tossing a ball into the air of height H, Person A shines a flashlight to a mirror at height H. The new constraint is this; the velocity of light is a constant and cannot be faster for Person B. Now what? Length contraction / time dilation is what.
What would it be like to ride on a beam of light? What would happen if you're on a motorcycle that's going the speed of light, that then has a headlight that's throwing light forward at the speed of light?
It's not possible even in a though experiment, as nothing that has mass (i.e. a motorcycle) can be going at the speed of light. It can be going (theoretically) at 99.999999% of lightspeed, but that's conceptually different.
Special relativity is the set of equations that arises when you take a hypothesis: "you always perceive light as traveling at a speed `c`, no matter how fast you're going" and work out what would have to change in order to allow this statement to hold true.
If you're in a spaceship with no windows, out in space, and you are in free-fall (not accelerating), there's no experiment you can do that will tell you whether you are moving or not.
If your spaceship has a window, and you look out and see another spaceship passing by (but nothing else) you can't tell whether you're still and it's moving, or you're moving and it's still, or you're both moving. You can detect the relative velocity between you and the other ship, but not the absolute velocity (because there isn't one.)
Intuitively we are used to a "absolute" reference frame provided by the bulk of the Earth but that's just a (highly) local context.
In space (which is to say, in our Universe) there's no absolute reference frame, so you literally cannot have an absolute velocity, and obviously you can't have a physical law described by an equation that includes a term that doesn't exist, n'est-ce pas?
I love that he chose bus tickets, because I used to collect UK bus tickets. I started because I used to repair bus ticket machines (made by Almex Control Systems ltd) in the early 1990s.
I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).
Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.
I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".
I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.
Having done passion projects for 15 years, the elephant in the room is: Do you have dependents and do they support you? At some point in time, your worthless obsession will feel like selfishness to your dependents and yourself. Its a material world after all. This is a great article, but a reality check will be helpful!
He talked about children in the article. And also, work that matters generally doesn’t leave a genius starving: it’s the difference between obsessive interest into things that matter and bus ticket collecting.
You could of course be at the point where you started too late and you haven’t time to ramp up useful work into successful outcomes through obsessiveness, as you already have dependents. Or you could be in the unlucky edge he talks about of people who only went down the wrong paths due to risks turning out wrong.
But I believe the article did address all of your points.
Obsession with work that matters won't leave you starving, but it will leave you starved for time; anything that's a priority will draw away time and attention from other priorities e.g. relationships and family.
Quite a lot. But, the one I spent most time was in creating a programming language that stores its source code as parse tree instead of text file. If you rename a variable, it will automatically change all the code, UI and DB that refers it.
That sounds like a very useful idea! IDEs have made refactoring large projects much easier than it used to be but I can still see how your representation is superior. Text files as storage for computer programs are awkward, you're always left with huge impedance mismatch between the form in which you specify what you want and the form it eventually takes.
I like the thesis, but peeling the onion back, there's an implicit assumption that one is always optimizing for world-changing impact. Looking back at Newton and sorting his work into useful/worthless buckets after a few hundred years tells us nothing about how he actually valued these pursuits, and what motivated him at the time. As silicon valley culture goes mainstream, salaries at big tech soar, and increasing numbers of young people buy into the value of creating "impact", the irony is that it pushes more young talent towards local maxima instead of truly novel pursuits that might could lead to world-changing innovation. IMHO the only way out of this conundrum is actually to be okay with not making world-changing innovation and directly embrace the creative process of ones pursuits.
I thought the point of the essay is that the obsessed will be obsessed, with possibly great results, regardless of whatever the lucrative career path of the moment is. It's not about anybody "optimizing" anything.
The first half of the essay aligns with your takeaway. But the second half does start to delve into how to identify useful obsessions, starting with "But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters." Which sounds like an optimization, and which seems at least somewhat at odds with a major starting premise that you mentioned ("They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.").
I agree with OP, the thesis makes sense assuming the primary goal of one's life is discovering world-changing ideas (what he's calling "genius"). That's understandable from a VC perspective since that's basically what VCs do. But most of us here aren't VCs, and while idea discovery is a great goal to have even if you're not a VC, it doesn't have to be the primary one.
This made me realize how harmful the focus on "impact" at BigCo's is. You got all these decently talented people, who all can see a variety of paths of how they can help the company, some which uniquely use that persons obsessions, but instead we're asked to cut all those paths short in favor of the one which ahead of time we think will make numbers go up the most for BigCo's core business. No wonder we end up with all these half-assed me-too products.
But yeah, thanks Paul for giving me an excuse to keep noodling with programming language design and implementation. I'm sure there's genius to be found in there one day ;)
> When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage them to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep. I don't do this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want them to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feel that about something I'm making them learn. It has to be something they're interested in. I'm just following the path of least resistance; depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show them the joy of learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better.
I feel like this part captures the essence of it... to be _really_ good at something, you have to have deep interest which you can't force - so just forget about being good, it's not worth worrying about, instead discover what you can have fun with and get crazy about. This feels like such a natural thing to encourage in kids :)
Also the side effects of getting deeply interested in random things should not be underestimated, in my experience the connections between seemingly disconnected things are unexpectedly common.
"The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose" -Woody Allen, Match Point (2005)
I had one of those rare moments recently where I actually had an encounter with someone I considered to be an honest-to-God Genius. I won't go into the specifics. But it was at a public lecture. Elite research university. Auditorium packed with scientists of "Breakthrough" and "Nobel" calibre. And we were all "wow'ed"!
Afterwards I got to chat a bit with the relatively young researcher who gave the lecture. And I asked her point blank how she knew to follow path X when everyone else was following Y?
And she admitted it was sheer dumb luck! They had run out of the exotic material in the lab, and so she had to use its more common predecessor. Furthermore, all the elements had aligned to produce that infinitesimally improbable atomistic level perturbation at that very moment that led to her insights. Luck compounded upon luck.
And at that moment, it was much like PG described. Obsession, coupled with absolute conviction. She could not let go of The Idea. What's most interesting is that this finding occurred mid-200s. And it was only now a decade and a half later, that the world was beginning to realize its fruits ;)
> Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested. They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.
I don't agree with this. They might very well do it to impress others. Most of all, they do it to impress each other. Go to any specialized forum of subreddit and you will find members arguing over details in order to gain respect. If I say X, you say Y and in the end X 'wins', I have gained some status. Bus ticket collectors are people, just like us, and need validation from their peers.
I think there is room for three types of folks along this dimension. Yes, some people enjoy the validation, but there are plenty of obsessive folks who simply don't care for the validation. They take delight in the subject matter independent of peers.
Definitely a lot of peer validation in niche obsession. But the single person niche exists as well (and people in a bigger niche, but isolated), and there the only person to impress is oneself. A bigger the niche means that chances to stumble upon something still undiscovered are lower, so peer validation is irrelevant or maybe even a negative signal for obsessions that might turn into genious.
This essay has a very individualist underlying assumption that one person has to do it all. Maybe that's not true? Could a community of hobbyists who share the same obsession make progress?
If a lot of the effort comes from going down blind alleys until you hit on something, it seems like the work could be pretty easily distributed?
I believe the answer is yes. I'm thinking about the Homebrew Computer Club, the framers of the Constitution, and the musicians who developed modern jazz. It sounds odd, but the Constitution was written by a bunch of rich guys who happened to share a passion for learning about history and politics. When one of their kids got in trouble, the only advice they could come up with was to read yet another old book in Latin.
Jazz was commercially viable for a time, maybe into the 1950s, but then the musicians had to adopt a model of playing boring commercial music, and teaching music to kids for a living, while pushing the boundaries of jazz in living rooms and academic music departments.
> Could a community of hobbyists who share the same obsession make progress?
That's a very good point and worthy of its own essay. I'm thinking of how even though there are more scientists working than ever, breakthroughs are still rare.
Maybe combining Paul's idea with the idea of bringing such people together via forums/communities would accelerate progress? (And no, I don't think academic labs count). Ah, maybe something like the Polymath Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project
Of course they could. The success of many fan communities for topics (especially modding/ROM hacking/game development ones) often comes down to a largish group of dedicated hobbyists working together to push things forward. That's how you get stuff like SMW Central or Sonic Retro.
Same deal with stuff like speedrunning communities, eSports scenes, etc.
Or outside of that field, open source software development and web development in general. How many of the advancements in say, programming language design are made by hobbyists compared to academics?
I can't stop thinking about applied fun theory to card game mechanics. I'm building a card game where you never leave the flow state. (I know there's been a lot of cash grab card games recently. I just genuinely enjoy card games.)
Specifically this question -
Why is soccer more widely played than checkers?
Physical Mastery - repetitive exploration of real world ball physics encourages a sense of mastery. Checkers doesn't have this. I've built a physics sim into the card game to replicate this sense of building mastery through exploring the physics system to win.
Mental Mastery - Both soccer players and checker players make choices that feel fun and meaningful. When trying to dribble around an opponent, they have multiple options they must chose (right or left, fakeout). The player must have a model of what their opponent might do and react based on that. Updating their model is a sense of mental mastery that can be rewarding and contribute to flow.
Real Time - Soccer doesn't have turns. In checkers, waiting for the opponent can break the flow state if you already know your move. The demo allows players to play cards in real time. The catch is - when you run out of cards in hand you loose.
Accessibility - People can just pick up a ball shaped object and ball. I built a demo in WebGL so people can just hop in.
Simplicity of Rules and Depth of Choices - Instead of having a convoluted health system, the amount of cards in your hand are your health. This makes picking up the game easy, there's just one rule to keep in mind. This allows for a variety of fun choices because each card you play lowers your health. This creates a fun risk reward system with no additional rules.
The other idea is to use the existing physics system that players are already familiar with. That way there's no tutorial - players already know how cards handle and drop in real life.
I don't want to sound overly critical of your explanations but you seem to ignore the most important difference:
We play soccer with our entire bodies, muscles, heart, legs, lungs get a workout. Not to insult the players but mind and thought processes are somewhat secondary, it is about the "lizard brain": attack and defend with instincts and reflexes.
When you play checkers it is your mind that gets a workout. It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
There are almost no similarities between the two! Making it into a physics simulator does not make it a physical excercise...
> It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
I think you deeply underestimate how much thought and intellect go into playing soccer. It is a game, and applying intelligence to it is necessary to be good at it.
Disclaimer: I don't like football (US: soccer), but I know very smart people that play.
That's a great point! There's no workout/lizard brain attack defense component. It's also missing a physical exercise component. You're right that does seem like a huge part of the appeal. I'm wondering what I could do to add that appeal.
Beat Saber seems to handle the workout component slightly.
What about a VR version where cards come flying at you and you have to dodge them/block them? That might wake up the lizard/attack/defense part of the brain. That actually sounds pretty fun.
I don't think it was overly critical at all and appreciate the response!
Fellow physicist-by-training. Got interested in "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" a few years ago. As I delve into the roots of the field, I increasingly feel that many interesting ideas seem to have been discarded without justification other than the field switching en masse to a different fad at some instant.
Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see anyone else being interested in them right now. I think there might be interesting insights into both biological and artificial intelligence (with communication definitely being an important component; consciousness is a word I avoid till I can find a more concrete handle on it), but it's primarily based on interest/taste, rather than motivated goal chasing :-)
(I'm more interested in concrete ideas from Wiener, Ashcroft, etc. rather than the fluff that came later as the word's usage got stretched beyond meaning, as is now happening with "AI")
Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.
Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- - - -
In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e. what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor "seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?
I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video: https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth
He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.
Yes to cybernetics. Its day will come again! If you go deep, it's a rabbit hole to discover why teleology in science is so controversial. Wiener said cybernetics started from the idea that Intelligence is all about decreasing local entropy.
I can get latched onto many subjects, most of them useless. Like, what is the best way to split firewood while living in an apartment building? Or what is the best RV for me (I'm not buying one until I spend X days renting)? It's really getting in the way of more worthwhile pursuits.
10 years ago I was quite engrossed in automatic layout of UI elements to automatically accommodate e.g. localized text of different size (Apple's iOS UI layout tools at the time were awfully crude, not sure about now). Around the same time I was much very into application state management (same problem solved by flux, but different approach). Having "solved" these two problems for my use case I have since moved on.
Recently I am into mapping business workflows to data structures, visualizing them back, and then providing control over them, e.g. order/invoice/shipping processing in wholesale trade. Nifty stuff, and trickier than the other two things.
I really enjoyed this article. For me, I have two main ones. Professionally, it is four freedoms computing and ways to empower people with it. Privately though, since I got out of the military, has been an obsession with geopolitics and geostrategy. You might be surprised how interrelated I increasingly think the two are.
What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me. I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
>What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me.
Yeah, it's just how the lives of billions are organised, changed, and affected, no big matter...
>I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
That's the very theory put forward just before 1914, about how a war in Europe was not possible anymore, because of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" promoting "safety and stable cooperation" between countries. The possibility of war was laughed at as "The big delusion". We know how that turned out.
Then there was the same idea, of the "end of history", with the triumph of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" put forward after the USSR collapsed. We also know how that turned out.
Historically, "economic freedom and classical liberal values" have been very good at war and fierce geopolitics.
For me it just started as trying to understand the why of the Iraq war. I worked my way up the chain from my grunts eye view and kept going up that chain. I think it had a very similar appeal to computers when I was younger, in that I could understand things that most others couldn't, and that was and is a good feeling in a strange way. Combined with a very American upbringing and the fact I swore an oath to the constitution also makes me feel like it is my duty in some way, especially given the kind of insight I have grown into. I started with the question "why", and my eyes didn't really open till I realized I was leaving all the other W's out. This is the obsessive part as referenced in the post, because a part of me wants to let it all go and just focus on trying disrupt society through tech, or art, or something equivalent, but it seems a Sisyphean task I can't let go of.
Not OP, but why not geopolitics? It's like thinking how your village's future will look like, but in a planet level...
For example the Iraq war quagmire has lead to Al-Qaida and ISIS (well, forest fires in Russia also caused grain harvests in Russia to suffer, food prices to go up, and the Arab Spring to happen), this has lead to the refugee crisis in Europe, that combined with austerity has lead to the rise of populism in Europe, and Brexit.
Paul seems to write about obsession as something that can be cultivated. In my personal experience, this has been either a personality trait or extreme focus and hard work because of some expected reward. For me this article feels more like a motivational speech rather than an actual theory.
Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also one of those things anyone can do if only...?
Depression can also lead to a singlar focus. I am pretty sure I have finished a few projects out of despair I would have never otherwise. Perhaps at the expense of other more 'practical' ones, but I have come to value them more.
> there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters. For example, it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates. It's more promising if something you're interested in is difficult, especially if it's more difficult for other people than it is for you. And the obsessions of talented people are more likely to be promising. When talented people become interested in random things, they're not truly random.
You can be very rigorous in trying to understand some topic, such that you won’t be satisfied until you understand it from first principles. Since so few people do this, it can lead to new discoveries.
If anyone wants a beautiful obsession that requires only kindle books and internet searches, allow me to suggest Western Esotericism. It's not what you think.
Try to reconstruct the role of Pythagoras on modern society-- and then realize that the first attested hypothesis-driven scientific research question still hasn't been answered.
Start with "Western Esotericism: a guide for the perplexed" or the incredible Shwep.net, the "secret history of Western Esotericism podcast".
Just to point out, we not only find stuff where our obsession lies, we can sometimes create complexity and interesting stuff where it lies, out of the thin air.
I'm obsessed about audio/music tech. Some part of this area is immensely complex due to people's obsession with good sound, or new interesting sounds, or new ways of altering it. They don't discover these things, they create it. Time stretch or pitch shift algorithms, for example, were created (I suppose) by obsessed people who like to create complexity and by extension, useful stuff.
So no, Darwin's invention model is not the only possible one.
I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets, but who knows, maybe some key to inventing more efficient public transport lies there. Or at least more efficient bus ticket printing. Can be anything!
> I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets,
Some people have an obsession for the actual tickets, while others have an obsession with the ticketing pricing system. These people can find useful oddities with the system. In some parts of the UK it's worthwhile buying a year long railcard for two stations that you will never travel to or from, because that gives you a gold card, and the gold card gives you 1/3 off other tickets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrFze0XH5M
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying if you want to test systems you want a legitimate way for these people to look at it, because otherwise they may find ways that are problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum
But also, the essay does say that some obsessions are useful and others don't appear to have wider uses than being interesting for that individual person.
True, but my point was that it seems like usefulness can be created out of the think air, i.e. you don't discover it (or miss it) but instead you direct your obsession towards usefulness by adding complexity. I think maths is a great example of this, though some big part of it hasn't proved its usefulness yet.
Academia, for all its faults, is still an excellent system for collecting those who are obsessive about s subject (at least for a certain set of “established” subjects.) It’s preposterously difficult to do the PhD-through-tenure course if you’re not obsessed, and it certainly isn’t the financially optimal career path; if someone has made it through that system, you can be sure they’re happy sitting and doing their subject all day, for days.
Not really, it depends in the field. I have definitely met academics that after an early success just keep going. The extent to which they work in one area relates more to their initial success than any obsession. Similarly well established academics that quit to do something similar to their research but not very related and much better paid.
When someone in a sports psychology session broke down motivation into internal vs external [1], they changed the way I would approach anything I do from then onwards. Literally changed my life in 20mins.
There are two other ingredients to genius that are even less often discussed:
1. Opportunity
2. A sense that pursuing opportunities is important
Some never find good opportunities to learn and never improve. Some are surrounded by good opportunities to learn but never recognize them or don't think they're important to pursue. Being in an environment with good opportunities and having the impulse to pursue them has a lot to do with your personal background and upbringing. Surely counterexamples can be found, but I think they're in the minority. Until society comes to terms with this, it will continue to waste most of its intellectual talent.
This is very close to some of my own observations about talent.
Whenever I've had the info to compare, I tend to find a different degree of skill among coders who started as teens compared to those who came to it later. I put it down to interest. Obsessive teens end up spending huge amounts of time learning things. Teenagers know very little about what makes money, at least when I was a kid. The cat may well be out of the bag about tech jobs now though, YMMV. I'll address it further down in the part about professionals.
The same goes for sporting talent, except there you seem to have to make decisions that are against financial sense. Here's two anecdotes.
A very famous F1 driver went to school with a friend of mine. He got booted from the school for not showing up, preferring to practice driving. This is before he got famous, so you can imagine how foolish that might have seemed if he hadn't eventually gotten a seat. OTOH he might never have become world champion without pouring a crazy amount of time into it.
I recently discovered that a very famous footballer would cross the water to my neighborhood and play with the kids there. I'm not sure he was even allowed to by the club that had signed him, but he'd already conquered his home town and decided there were more interesting games nearby in the larger city. He evidently thought nothing of it, enjoying himself greatly practicing the skill moves that he's become famous for.
On a related note, the disinterested interest thing is why I've never met a talented professional. By that, I mean the classic suit-and-tie professionals. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers. I've met plenty of competent ones, but never that special one who seems to be especially knowledgeable or passionate. My guess is that very few kids choose these interests without the motivation provided from a steady salary and high social status. These are also the professions that people talk about retiring from as if it were a given that nobody would hang around if they didn't have to. Particularly among bankers, you often talk about your "number", which is the amount of money that would make you quit and do something you actually like. It's not that people in other professions don't ever retire, but you can imagine a retired carpenter making chairs for himself. I don't think of retired accountants doing taxes for fun.
With software these days you get both. Kids who were going to learn coding even if it meant having no food, along with people who just want a good income doing something leaning towards a slight interest of theirs. Granted, that slight interest may well grow into something much deeper, and software is unique in the way it allows this.
> On a related note, the disinterested interest thing is why I've never met a talented professional. By that, I mean the classic suit-and-tie professionals. Lawyers, doctors, accountants,...
I think your comment is directionally correct if you look at the bulk of practitioners, but I wonder if you’ve looked in the right places for the exceptions.
As one example, some of the best legal thinkers I have met were in law schools. That said, I’ve also met some “practicing” lawyers who had that passion — at retirement age, they are often the sages that people make pilgrimages to see (my friend’s father was one of these for estate law).
There are also professionals who pursue their compulsory continuing education aggressively. For doctors, this is actually a litmus test I use when I am looking for a new one (usu. due to moving). I had a dentist who, after establishing his practice, went back to school to get his MD so that he could work on the more interesting problems of oral surgery. He then joined the Army reserves as a doctor/dentist to help the Army with some of the unique medical problems they have (iirc, it was mostly oral surgery).
> ... bankers
You may be right here.
That said, if you expand “banker” to “financier” or something like that, you can probably find some. Buffet and Munger come to mind. John Mauldin as a writer on economics/finance also comes to mind as a lesser-known personality. There seems to be a potentially long list.
> I don't think of retired accountants doing taxes for fun.
Although rare, they exist. I have a retired family member who is one of them.
Teenagers have an inbuilt compulsion to develop skills. That’s why they skateboard, learn to play musical instruments (of their own volition; think about unruly teenage drummers and guitarists rather than forced piano or violin practice), often play sports, and even learn to do pencil twirling tricks. More and more it seems that video games are consuming that instinct. This seems universal and is unrelated to the obsession that pg writes about, but if you combine the two forces it seems particularly effective.
The universality of compulsive teenage skill-building means that different cultures see it manifest in different ways. In ours, gaming is a big way it manifests, and when I was a teenager there was a skateboard subculture, perhaps there still is. In 14th century Mongolia all the boys learned horse archery, which is part of why they conquered the biggest land empire in world history. This is also where approximately all professional athletes come from—usually combined with extraordinary ego and competitiveness, though occasionally some (perhaps Messi) might have more of the obsession pg writes about.
>On a related note, the disinterested interest thing is why I've never met a talented professional. By that, I mean the classic suit-and-tie professionals. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers. I've met plenty of competent ones, but never that special one who seems to be especially knowledgeable or passionate.
Alternative theory: the geniuses that go into those professions tend to be extremely successful, and so you don't end up meeting them.
What I find useful about going deep is not usually what I find at the bottom. It's the tools that I employed on the way that prove useful later. And that's not only if I'm the first to invent them! Even if they are a well-known pattern: I have now experienced them in ways that instruction cannot provide.
I think your social life or lack of has a large influence on the things you become obsessed about. A lot of friends and people in general are not going to be supportive of your eccentric interests, in the worst case they might judge you poorly for it but in the best case they don’t mind but don’t find it interesting either. It might be great for your startup ambitions to have a lot of eccentric obsessions, but it’s also socially isolating. I think there’s a reason why a lot of geniuses were also social outcasts.
This sounds like a retread of Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Instead of putting the hours in, put in obsession instead. Whether by accident or design, I can imagine it being a flattering message on HN for regulars and for startup founders.
It's wrong. No amount of hours or obsession compensates for lack of raw talent.
Innate ability sets a talent ceiling. Hard work/time/obsession refine and manifest raw talent where it's there, but can't compensate when it isn't. (And a bad environment can cripple it - but that's a different debate.)
The proof is that science, engineering, and math have plenty of very bright, very obsessive, very hard-working people. But they still produce very few no-doubt-about-it outright geniuses.
In fact genius is a rare combination of raw domain talent combined with outstanding creative imagination. The former provides the ability to produce outstanding work, the latter pushes it over the line with the potential for game-changing originality.
Together they can completely transform a domain instead of simply broadening it.
This is not the same as reapplying something already known in a clever and creative way - which is what talented and gifted people do.
Genius pioneers a fundamental change in the understanding of reality and massively expands what humans are capable of imagining and doing within it.
"Innate ability sets a talent ceiling. Hard work/time/obsession refine and manifest raw talent where it's there, but can't compensate when it isn't. (And a bad environment can cripple it - but that's a different debate.)"
Absolutely. I can't stand it when someone says, "if I did it, anybody can." Not only is it wrong; it can be downright abusive.
Yeh but what if you have no obsession to use your talent ? Then what ? What is the point of having amazing talent like singing but instead you get stuck in mc Donalds flipping burgers. Obsession is the key. Obsession & talent combined would be unstoppable.
About 20 years ago I was having a quiet pint with a friend and he casually says "I wish I was passionate about something". It always stuck with me, still haven't found anything I'd consider I'm passionate about, still looking though!
Its funny, I'm the opposite, there's so many things I'm passionately interested in. The hard part is picking one or two. My one day I'll have to get back to that list is enough for a couple of lifetimes. I try top pick the ones that are the most useful, or perhaps least useless. Keep looking you'll find something.
I'm more like you. Into math, music, fitness, nature, literature, movies...
but can I actually say I'm "passionate" about any of them? On any given day, I've likely spent zero time or effort on at least one of the above. Simply can't have a day when I've studied math (beyond cursory readings on the phone), practiced an instrument, worked out, hiked/camped, read, AND watched a movie
Its hard, I found I just have to pick a few I like the most and leave the rest go, I promise myself I'll get back to them but it seems less likely as the years go by. On my holidays I usually get back to something.
Are you passionate in the same way the commenter's friend meant, though? Passion means different things to different people, and maybe his friend was expressing his desire to be more passionate, which actually sounds like a trait you share with him, considering you're not more passionate about any one particular thing over other things.
Yeah... although passion and obsession aren’t the same. Passion is the more palatable and friendly version of obsession. The use of ‘obsession’ by pg is deliberate. The set of things you can be passionate about is much more limited, often constrained by your perception of what others will think. We (over)share our passions but hide our obsessions.
I was thinking the same thing. Being obsessively interested sounds neat when you watch others spend their entire lives, eg. collecting stamps and coins. According to this wisdom, when they find the rare gem that makes them a fortune they're geniuses. However, who can will themselves into becoming obsessive with something. Wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating if it is to take something out of it (ie. opposite of karma-yoga)?
What you can do:
- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit
- swim/exercise the body
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove yourself away from people
- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're not doing it just to score big!
Not so sure people can will themselves to change that much.
You can enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order. By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what you already are.
I agree with this. One thing I’d add from personal observation: things get more interesting the more time you spend with them. I’ve done ‘total immersion’ kinds of things with both math and the boardgame Go, with pretty good results in both cases. I pretty much just kept the topic around all the time for a sustained period. Sometimes that meant reading about history or philosophy of the subject, consuming related media, etc.
Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice configuration.
Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.
I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of gratifying experience.
Indeed. There are studies about grit and determination over time being strong indicators for possible later success. In any endeavour having some unknown value, overlooked by others, there will be periods where you feel all alone, experience some disinterest or need to grit through some necessary activities/work in order to push forward. There will not always be happy feelings about what you do or even why you do it, though such feelings will be more on the level of superficial aversion and procrastination. In activities and studies with heavy competition, that competition will be extremely hard to beat. Both may be overcome by grit and determination, while those with natural abilities or superior training, often give up earlier due to various unrelated reasons.
There is value in relaxing, there is value in letting go of control and following your impulses. Trying to drive out all fun may lead to a more productive life, but at the cost of a pleasurable life.
There are many ways to do this, like meditation, or some substances.
You basically imagine yourself in the future, having achieved some goal, or being in a situation that you like. This image has to be rich and invoke many emotions, so it becomes engraved in your neural paths.
You then work backwards from there, imagining different roads and specific steps on how to achieve that.
It literally and physically changes your brain over time, as you repeat it.
To quote Feynman: “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” It is relatively easy to get interested in various topics.
But being obsessively interested in one/few of them is a completely different matter -- a lot of other "normal" aspects of life tend to suffer as a side-effect. Our society does not do a good job of nurturing and encouraging such lopsided profiles, and trying to keep that spark alive while leading a "normal" life extracts an incredibly heavy cost. Understandably, most "normal" people (instinctively) find that to be a cost not worth paying. Embedded in contemporary society, few such people manage to pursue their interest to their satisfaction, and fewer do well enough to be considered "successful" by society (a vanishing fraction become outstandingly successful, and are then called "geniuses").
Do you mean interested in something or interested in a specific topic?
If you’re not curious about the world in general, then I’m not sure anything can change that trajectory, although I could be wrong.
For a specific topic, I recommend learning about that topic from someone who is passionate about it and who is a good teacher.
Sometimes this can be as easy as reading books by a good author. When I was in high school, I despised history. It turns out that I despised it because I had never been exposed to compelling history. I ended up becoming friends with someone who was a passionate historian, and he pointed me to compelling resources that totally changed my mind about history.
In college, I had no interest in art or art classes. A friend of mine took a drawing class that she said “blew her mind”. I couldn’t believe it, but she just told me to trust her and take the class. I asked a few other people, and they all said the same thing. I took the class, and they were all correct. While the topic was technically drawing, the professor pushed us to explore what our drawing told us about ourselves, how we could expand our minds through drawing, and how our drawing related to our interactions with the world. Just re-reading that, it sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit, but to experience it was something else, and it is something most participants in that class took away in a positive way.
I ended up minoring in art, and I worked with another professor who really stretched my mind.
While these are my personal experiences (and there are many more that I didn’t mention), I think I have seen this pattern amongst my friends and acquaintances as well. As such, I recommend finding a good, highly recommended, talented teacher if you want to get interested in a new topic. Note that they are not always easy to find.
For me, no, I don't think I can do that. For years I've been doing the "Electronics is cool, I should learn more about it but not today" routine. Now, I started doing some heavy research into solar energy, for purely practical reasons, and I'm finally actually interested in electronics and learning. I can't seem to summon interest in something unless I see at least a little bit of practical use for myself. I think one of the reasons is that learning is too abstract, unless connected to a particular problem I'm trying to solve.
With electronics, the issue is that yes it sounds very cool but I just didn't see what I could do with the knowledge. Sure, I'll buy an arduino and have it water my pot flower but that's utterly boring and useless.
But with solar energy systems, there are a lot of intricacies and compromises and learning electronics is very rewarding.
The downside is that I seem to lose interest very quickly, once I solve my particular problem. But I still learn a lot and have fun in the meantime.
One way is to enter a competition with others. Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors. Incidentally, many cool things seem to spring out of some kind of a "scene" (which is defined by this friendly competition among its members).
> Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors.
Eh, I had a large collection. I still have a collection of a few hundred tickets (not worth much, a few hundred pounds). I started the collection in about 1997. I stopped in about 2003. I've never shown other collectors my tickets, and I've only put about 5 tickets online and that was only this year.
I think for this obsessional collecting it's really not about other people. It's about systematizing and categorising the world. Outside is chaos and confusion. In here, with this collection, there is order and control.
I love it that on HN my point can be disproved by an actual bus ticket collector! Still I think my larger point stands - Girardian mimetic desire (http://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro) is a powerful force that certainly can get you interested in something.
Oh! I don't want to say I'm disproving your point. I'm only providing a small counter example. Maybe most other people are driven by sharing their collection? Museums have been a big deal for a while and some of that is around collecting the obscure items in order to display them
Yes. There is beauty in everything, if you look hard enough you can find it. This is something I've routinely done in my life, and I attribute it to most of my success. At some point in university I learned to enjoy doing my assignments and school work, which paid off dramatically.
However, I think that a prerequisite to this is to be a naturally curious person.
I think to me this is the key question raised by the essay.
A lot of people with fixed and repetitive interests in something will be autistic. I'd be interested to know what the ratios are for autistic vs not for people who have this kind of obsessive interest.
Often, you can get close enough to make it a useful approach. Start from the easiest parts, and then gradually drill deeper while making sure that you're building up a solid understanding, without taking unclear, obscure shortcuts. This is not always easy, but the payoff can be quite real.
Prediction:'Bus ticket collecting' will enter our lexicon as a new way to describe obsessive pursuits with little or no perceived impact - or at least it would appear to have no foreseeable impact or future to you at that point in time. The opposite of what you should be doing with your life if you want to make a difference. As in : "Although I enjoyed my new research area, at times I wondered if I was merely bus ticket collecting.."
The paradox though is that you cannot know in advance if you are merely bus ticket collecting or pursuing something that will have a real impact. Just like Darwin had no way of knowing if his excessive obsession with natural history would go on to change the world, and lead to the theory of evolution. In the essay, pg does give heuristics on how to figure out the difference - but the greater the potential for impact the less likely it is that you will be able to tell the difference. In other words, the most transformative discoveries will likely seem most like bus ticket collecting and a wase of time, at least initially.
My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent (https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about...). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" (http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html), and apocryphal stories indicate he may have written it from his own experience.
Beyond some point, being smart really isn't a good thing. You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you. You live on top of a cold, windy, snowy mountain while everybody else lives in a warm and fertile valley. Yet you choose to live on the mountain anyways, because after you lose everything, you realize that's just who you are, and there's really nothing you can do about it beyond accepting it.
And so you are insane. You don't care about being comfortable, or about being paid well, or about people liking you, or having fewer problems in life, or anything else that makes sense. You just care about obsessing over that something.
People always talk about genius like it's some good thing. Maybe sometimes, if you obsess over something society values. But few people talk about the price of genius, probably because we're taught from an early age that being smart is a good thing and so few people go that far off the deep end anyways. I think it should be said, especially for HN types, that there can always be too much of a good thing. That it's healthy to relax, not take things so seriously, have a sense of humor, and relate to other people. That a good life is worth living. Because to forget that is a life lost.
I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging.
I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an excuse for antisocial behavior.
Here’s the thing. If you’re so brilliant, you should be able to learn basic social skills, manners, and hygiene. It’s not that hard. And if you do find it hard, maybe it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.
One can be obsessive about a thing without being offensive about that thing or anything else. I think you are equating two separate issues. Social awkwardness is just not the same thing as anti-social behaviour.
And in my industry experience, having an encyclopedic knowledge of an obscure subject around a bunch of imposters does not go well, doubly so if their career depends on convincing others that they have skills on par with yours despite never putting the time into acquiring them.
To me it's like they demand everyone be fungible when the real power move is using comparative advantage to build a winning team.
> it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.
The problem isn't that savant's are above these things, but that they matter very little to them. They aren't helpless geniuses who don't know the path to learning social skills, but understand that the reward of those skills just isn't high enough for them personally as it is to most people.
Its hard to relate to that because most human beings are wired to feel good in social situations, but there are those who feel good only when they obsess over the things that they're interested in (and find deep satisfaction from). Put differently, the reward centers that guide most people don't guide them as much. They understand what they're "giving up", but while for others that might be something of great value, it means very little to them.
I might agree with you. People who are successful are able and willing to push that EQ bound, because they recognize all implementation achievements (e.g. businesses) are multi-person efforts. People who are "geniuses" oftentimes don't connect those dots.
I think the key to understanding insanity is that it's a visceral, primal thing. It is difficult for one to recognize, let alone control, let alone master. Insanity from genius even more so, because people are socially conditioned to "want to be smart" and that "bad things happen to people who are not smart", even though "being smart" is multivariate. It takes a lot of work to let go. Being able to understand the mental models of these people and empathizing with them is how we can build a kinder world, and maybe capture some of the surplus these people have to offer as a nice bonus.
10x engineers thing is a lot lot simpler than that. In vast majority of cases, it's just one normal engineer surrounded by a crowd of people who should have been flipping burgers, but ended up working as 0.1x engineers because of "talent shortage" which is in fact just some bosses being too greedy to pay normal wages. Over time, abysmal productivity and quality of their work becomes the norm, and one normal guy who randomly happened to be there is seen as a semi-deity.
Yes, and it's often enabled by the manager and the rest of the team who allow the 10xer to work from home several days in a row on a sprint until he's changed the code so drastically that only he can understand it
To be fair, if someone really does produce useful code that none of their peers or coworkers can understand, I wouldn't dismiss the notion that they are somehow "different."
I know you're railing against the Linus Torvalds man-child types, and I agree that I wouldn't really enjoy working with a person like that. The parent comment wasn't really about excusing poor treatment of others though, it was just describing the isolation that can be felt.
What makes you think it would be easier for that person to develop the social skills than for their peers to learn to understand their work? Maybe those people just neglected to develop their reasoning/coding skills? Or maybe people's brains actually can work in profoundly different ways.
The people who dominate the stereotype of "genius" are also those who have debilitating mental disorders, and far too many people can't separate those two things.
> You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you.
Given that this is not an experience which is at all unique to intelligent people, why should the assumption be that, when this happens to someone intelligent, somehow it was caused by intelligence?
I once worked at a place where one interview question was, "Imagine you were digging a hole x by y by z and it look q minutes. How much dirt was in the hole at time r"?
I instantly answered, "There's no dirt in the hole, because a hole is defined by there not being any dirt".
They were like, "Wow, that was fast. Most people we interview take five to ten minutes to come to that conclusion".
Me: "I have a really bad feeling about this".
Unfortunately, I was right. I don't think the people there were bad people or dumb people (both are subjective value judgments, and that just seems passé now), but it was a really bad fit for me because I couldn't relate to anybody, even professionally. It sucks because if I was able to relate to more people at that time, I would have had more options I would have been happy with, and choice is wealth. Instead, I had to burn cycles outside of work on professional development in order to feel like I'm not trapped, which inevitably causes burnout. It's a horrible feeling. I wish I was more ignorant and felt less pain about these esoteric, really meaningless matters. But I can't. And I'm nowhere close to being a genius, so they have it worse than I do.
This reminds me of how Piaget's theories of childhood development were discredited. The researchers would spread out three pencils, and ask the kid if there were now more pencils. The kid knew there weren't, but generously tried to understand what the adult might want? Perhaps there's a new meaning to the word here?
And also a recent Facebook puzzle, apparently outside the problem statement were instructions to return answers by Facebook Messenger, then the puzzle question was "to respond, what do you open first?" Trick question, except a bogus answer as my Facebook Messenger was already open.
As a research mathematician, one comes across as a complete jerk if one is too literal about a question one is actually smart enough to reformulate properly. We give others the benefit of the doubt all the time, math or life. Here, the only sensible interpretation is the volume of dirt remaining in what will soon become hole.
If they seriously meant "no the hole is empty" then yes cut the interview short, and run don't walk out of there.
This interview question sounds disingenuous, if this was the only correct answer. It’s sort of a poorly worded question, and I’d only ask it if I wanted to see how the interviewer poked holes in it. Even then I’d be sort of an asshole for it. But the main reason it’s disingenuous is the same reason HN has the rule to always be generous with your interpretation of comments. Words are ambiguous, and people take lots of shortcuts to save time at the expense of precision. ‘Hole’ in the context of this question can very reasonably be generously be interpreted as ‘the space where the final hole will be at time q’. It sounds like a ‘gotcha question’, and these have no place in an interview.
Meanwhile, keep your head up. You can sort of learn to turn down the literal interpretation impulses of your brain, if that’s something causing you pain. It’s something I’ve gotten better at over the last 30 years (though its still really hard when I’m tired or stressed). It makes casual encounters easier, and more enjoyable when I do.
Couldn't agree more. I also think that it's very easy for society to conflate genius and success. There are loads of folks I went to college with who, to me, were conventionally what I'd think of as geniuses. Extremely talented from a young age, remarkably fully formed, with a very well developed sense of intuition that many folks I've worked with will never achieve.
Regardless, ten years on, that doesn't always translate into self-awareness, happiness, or the ability to shape their lives into something fulfilling long term. For me, the early few years of my career were a very rude awakening of this sort, but once I accepted it, an entirely new world opened up to me. Ironically enough, not feeling the need to compare myself to someone who was a "genius" freed me to truly develop myself to a point I'd never be capable of when I was younger.
Your comment makes sense if we replace “smart” with “crazy”. Note that most geniuses are not crazy and don’t act crazy. I doubt any parents pointed to young Einstein, Feynmann, or von Neumann and told their kids not to be like them.
Also, I don’t think there’s such thing as being too smart. Worrying about that is like worrying that you will have to pay lots of taxes if you get rich. A good problem to have.
Finding inner motivation to do things other people find preposterous, tedious or uninspiring is the key. One should be driven by sincere curiosity. I don't know if I share PG's parenting strategy on "leave the generalism for someone else" - I think school does a crap job of general education, by dividing and labeling everything and implying it's covered ground.
Magnus Carlson says this about chess. Paraphrasing, there are probably smarter people at him, but they’re less likely to be as obsessed with chess and are more likely to seek novelty elsewhere.
> (...) The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they looked promising, other people would already have explored them.
an ode to metaphorical basement dwellers and a warning to those roaming illuminated paths
Nasreddin lost his ring in the basement of his house. He went outside and began searching. A curious passerby asked what he was doing.
"I've lost my ring" he said. "Where did you lose it?" asked the man.
"In the basement of my house" he replied. "Then why not look for it there?" said the man. "Because it's dark in my basement, and I can't see a thing in there!"
> (...) But as with any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk.
and a tool recently mentioned here for evaluating bets
Most people have no productive obsessive interests. They might obsess over Entertainment Tonight, if anything. That produces nothing of value for broader society. You might even say it halts growth as a society, corrupting our cultural fabric.
Geniuses are a gift because they generally apply their obsessions in a way that brings our culture forward. Investing and trading gurus who pore over 10-Ks or find alpha in trading signals and show incredible returns. Writers burning the midnight oil producing a prolific amount of high-quality work. Brian Chesky living in over 30 different AirBnB locations obsessing over the customer experience.
Hire the obsessive geniuses, then get out of their way. Not all of them will have a great "vision" or know what a good collaborative framework at work looks like. Sometimes your job as a founder and leader is to figure out how to let them flourish.
By your process though, you likely wouldn't discover the genius. After all, you wouldn't know if what they're doing is of value until afterwards. What if the Entertainment Tonight fanatic ended up writing brilliant blistering and influential social critiques later because of their obsession with pop culture? The point is you can't know upfront.
> For example, it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates.
That heuristic leads to bikeshedding. Try talking to an old white person for whom rap "doesn't sound like music to me." Inevitably they'll bring out the big guns-- that rap "just" takes the music that someone else wrote and talks over it.
Besides, there's no cost to dropping that heuristic. Nobody who scrolls through cat pics is in danger of thinking they are Vincent van Gogh. And if some "cat pic scroller" makes a real breakthrough in the artform I'd really prefer to talk about it without a bunch of grumpy, anti-intellectual gate-keepers whining, "how is that art?"
Taking something and talking over it is still creating. It still takes an active effort that results in something New, independent of how "easy" or "hard" someone might perceive it to be. Remixing is still creation & creative.
Consuming something someone else creates is more along the lines of Just listening, or Just reading, or Just observing some sort of art
One associated personality trait I've observed in the obsessive and successful is guilt free myopia.
If you either don't notice, or don't care, when people around you are negatively impacted by your obsession you can get so much more done. I must emphasize I don't think there's usually any malice involved, just an ability to forget that not eating dinner with your significant other might make them mad, or that being late to something might inconvenience a colleague.
There are, of course, serious caveats to this behavior and it can have lasting negative effects, but people who work well even in the face of attempted social interruptions or implied responsibilities strike me as quite free.
If you are too successful at something then you are probably too local in your steps/bets - you should make greater steps/bets by risking more in order to increase your overall progress. It is an optimal rule which was mathematically derived for convex functions, see the one-fifth rule at http://ls11-www.cs.tu-dortmund.de/people/beyer/EA-glossary/n.... The ratio itself is problem-dependent but the core idea is beautiful.
Sometimes I get angry when reading stuff like this: the reason is that whoever analyses the genius or success factor always misses among other points and features the importance of LUCK. Someone could say Luck does not exist for the prepared mind (paraphrasing Pasteur) but as the author of this post pointed out , had Darwin been born in 1709 instead of 1809 probably no one would have heard of him. This is the luck to be in the right place at the right time doing the right things with the right people.
Reflections from Marie Curie on the value of basic research:
"The story of radiology in war offers a striking example of the unsuspected amplitude that the application of purely scientific discoveries can take under certain conditions.
X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the time of the war. The great catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity, accumulating its victims in terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the ardent desire to save everything that could be saved and to exploit every means of sparing and protecting human life.
At once there appeared an effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of service. What had seemed difficult became easy and received an immediate solution. The material and the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment. All those who did not understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know learned; those who had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific discovery achieved the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar evolution took place in radium therapy, or the medical application of radiations emitted by the radio elements.
What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development shared between the new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of the nineteenth century? It seems that they must make our confidence in disinterested research more alive and increase our reverence and admiration for it."
I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow domains. (I used to be obsessed with chess, especially chess openings.) This may be a partial explanation of why there have been more male geniuses. Graham must be careful about what he writes, but he does say this:
"One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability. If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories to explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actually do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of the skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in different things.
The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to do great work after they have children. Here interest has to compete not just with external obstacles, but with another interest, and one that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to find time for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. The real change is that you don't want to."
Both fathers and mothers care about their children, but on average mothers care more and think more obsessively about them.
> I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow domains.
I don't think this is the case. Males just have low visibility into typical female 'obsessions' (or just don't care all that much about them), but the reverse is also generally true. Females tend to obsess about things that have a 'social' side, like their shoes collection - whereas males are more into physical, material things that can be played with.
Difficult terrain. Perhaps all these obsessions are fundamentally antisocial (hence some people call them autistic etc.) and women are raised to be more concerned about not being antisocial.
This is exactly right. I've come across this theory of obsession on my own and I've been helping my wife find what she's obsessed with. She watches things on YouTube like makeup tutorials that are things I would have never thought she was obsessed with.
Let's not be too hasty in concluding women's attention to their appearance and their children is completely genetic when all throughout history these were duties pushed onto them.
Darwin got to say "I'll be in my study" and "you take care of the kids and dinner and everything else" was just automatically implied.
You are arguing against an imaginary argument. Parent and grand parent comment did not say anything about genetics.
Darwin could go inside the study because his gender role was fulfilled by being rich. Had he been poor he might have said "I will be in the coal mine", and getting slowly and horrible killed.
Very few know people in history had the privilege to freely obsess over things which is outside their gender role, especially if the result leads to them not fulling that role through other means.
The comment from Bostonian did that. That person speculated that gender influence how obsessive a person is.
zozbot234 comment below that said "I don't think this is the case.", arguing instead that low visibility over gender lines makes people think that gender has an impact how obsessive a person is.
rhlsthrm comment below that one said "This is exactly right".
This is why I said parent and grandparent, ie zozbot234 and rhlsthrm comments, did not include genetics in their arguments, and I interpreted your comment as arguing against them as if they had argued in favor of genetics. If I am wrong and you directed your argument against the grandgrandparent then I am sorry for that interpretation.
Going out on a limb - because I have great respect for Paul Graham, I find this wrong headed. People have two kinds of thinking. Linear and Pattern. The problem with Pattern thinking is that it can't talk. Linear thinking can talk (think about it). How do we recognize faces? Do we use linear analysis - not at all, we just know. Is this genius? No. We all can do it, and we do it all the time. So no, this is not genius, this is just something we do and that linear thinking cannot explain. A la flatland.
Lets suppose this is true, that we are of two minds and one can articulate and the other cannot. Can we culture our intuitive mind? We often call Pattern thinking intuition, and Paul Graham raises a good condition for intuition, one that we are beginning to understand from neural networks - that you need lots of data and lots of training with data to have good intuition. Obsession will do it. Another prerequisite, as he points out is disinterest. You can either attempt to find the pattern or you can attempt to prove the pattern.
Personally, I like to think of this as original thinker. We all can be original thinkers, and in fact many startups come from original thinking. We see something around us with a pattern that makes no sense so we attempt to think, we essay, about the matter.
I think he would say "writing short programs", which leads to Lisp.
He designed the Arc language before he started ycombinator. He designed the Bel language after he left ycombinator. So it seems like ycombinator (and changing an entire industry) was an interlude between Lisps :)
If you had to rate obsessions on a scale from 0-100 on how likely they are to be useful, I would rate programming languages around a 5/100. It's exceedingly unlikely to come to anything (which I know from working on my own language :) )
But can a school be the right place for that? In my mental model of schools they are mainly for filling the gaps: make sure that the artsy types have at least some understanding of numbers, give numbers persons some command of language, make those with an aptitude for business understand the elementary principles of chemistry, give the sedentary the without they would otherwise never have. Some fostering of interests is fine, but even that is more important for managing morale in support of the gap-filling than the primary goal. I'd consider it hubris to assume that true excellence could ever be reached intracurricularly. That gap-filling is unglamorous, but incredibly important.
From the article: “The usual plan in education is to start with a broad, shallow focus, then gradually become more specialized. But I've done the opposite with my kids. I know I can count on their school to handle the broad, shallow part, so I take them deep."
I am with him on it. I witness this pattern in parents who seem to care about well rounded development of their kids. They keep their children constantly busy with a wide number of activities: on Monday the kid goes to dance lessons, on Tuesday they have English class, followed by drawing and music classes on Wednesday, etc. But round things cannot pierce and cut efficiently.
What if we focus on a single thing - that the kid shows some interest in - and encourage them to stick with it, focus on learning details and mastering the subject? Will it result in acquiring the skills and passion for diving deep into a chosen area, for exploring distant corners and intricate caves far from the crowds of tourists; not to be constantly lured by the songs of Sirens, that imprison people with generous dopamine shots of superficial excitement of shallow waters of something novel: a new flashy tech, another cool study subject, TV series, games, etc.
I have to disagree with this analysis on a couple different levels.
First, the opening statement that great work is a combination of natural ability + determination. I don't believe this to be the case, and I think this logic only works when you're doing post-hoc analysis for why certain people did well and others did not. There are plenty of people who had both natural ability and determination, yet failed throughout history. Some of them only becoming known long after their death (and whom lived in poverty to that point), others which failed because their choice of interest was considered to be the 'bus ticket collector' at the time.
Which leads me to my second point: We don't actually know if someone being a 'bus ticket collector' is valuable or not until long after their obsessive interest. For example, there are people that archived videos of various new stations. Those videos at the time were considered useless, but now they're more valuable because no one else was really obsessively archiving said video. This sort of thing isn't going to make someone rich or grant them status, but it's something that turned out to be very valuable to society as a whole and something that could be used to make someone rich.
Which ties into the fact that a lot of this is luck. You have to be lucky that what you're obsessed with is truly unique, that it's something that can earn you value now, and that you have the support network or monetary means to seize opportunities when they come across you. Sometimes the greatest discoveries are things that have been found solely by accident. You might be lacking a certain item, and you substitute it with something else which leads to a big breakthrough and so forth. Obsessive interest can help lead us to something great, but sometimes we simply trip upon something greater along the way.
On a more spiritual note, we're all bus ticket collectors. PG is defining "matters" as "what can make money", which is fine for a business-focused essay, but it does what we all attempt to do - convince ourselves that our domain has significance.
The truth is, whether we're bus ticket collectors or Bill Gates, we're all headed to the grave. Bus tickets or billionaires, we're all getting burned up. Both science and religion hint at the same endgame, best to ponder if there's something beyond that which changes the "what matters" equation in the living short-term.
Somewhat interesting PG cites both Newton and Pasteur in his essay - men who were obsessively pulled by their desire to understand their Creator and the infinitude of His magnificent creation:
Pasteur: "Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory."
I was thinking a lot about this myself recently: those people that have a 'compulsive, arbitrary obsession' with something and the resulting wealth of knowledge they tend to have.
I also don't believe it's really about 'love or passion' per say, it often seems to be more of an obsessive/compulsive attitude, like a behaviour that's in their DNA 'just the way they are'.
Whenever I read about 'some great person' I see how there's 100x more to them than 'what we see'. There's an obsession to the subject, the 'product' is just the tip of the iceberg.
Think about the recently released 'Mr. Robison' biopic and have a gander into his past talks. This man was not just about making some hum-dum kids show. This guy was not a sociologist, he was an ordained Minister, and hugely empathetic guy who was clearly obsessed with understanding the wellbeing of children, and the show was his vehicle for communicating issues and also communicating 'values' as he saw them. He would do a lot of 'research' in terms of interviews, questionnaires, etc. Though we might be smug about this in the sense that it wasn't very formal - I think we should be cautious to dismiss his work - we can learn a lot about any subject by simply inquiring, doing, observing. We definitely do not want to do this with clinical drug trials, and we probably want to still do more formal sociological research, but I don't think anything can replace his deep commitment to the cause.
Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Serena Williams, Justin Timberlake, Enrique Eglisias - these people were 'trained from birth' for their roles and each have vast wealth and knowledge of their disciplines. Clearly instituted into the trades by their parents, and probably a little bit forcibly on occasions, they will have nevertheless had to encompass that kind of 'arbitrary conviction'.
>we may be able, by cultivating interest, to cultivate genius.
That assumes that interest is something that can be cultivated, which i'm skeptical of. If somebody else had tried to become as interested in natural history as Darwin was, could they have achieved his genius?
I think interest is something that can be discovered, but not cultivated. You find something that you are interested in, you don't choose something to become interested in. Not everybody has the same innate level of curiosity, and not everybody will discover the thing that really interests them during their lifetime. But hacking away at something trying to cultivate interest so you can achieve genius doesn't sound productive to me - if you aren't naturally interested in something, don't waste your time on it. Or if you do sink your time into it, spend that time being productive, instead of trying to become interested.
In contrast to the essay, my hypothesis is currently that interest is developed. I used to be in the 'born talented camp', but then after reading Peak, The Talent Code, and other books on the subject (and essentially reviewing the research) I developed a 'born interested' hypothesis. In other words, some are born with innate interests that drive them toward deep and intense practice, developing skills and abilities or knowledge, that make them 'outliers'. Peak touches on this subject, and while it is certainly true that some level of interest is inherent, the (preliminary?) evidence is that this is only an inclination.
My personal experience (speaking as someone who is somewhat of an expert in a rather obscure oceanographic sub-field) is that the development of talent and interest (can) go hand in hand. You dig in, develop some skills, this opens up some possibilities that encourage (and provide encouragement) for you to develop further interest and further abilities, etc. The most radical form of the hypothesis is that we can develop a deep interest in almost anything. The 20 yr old me had no interest in the things that I am deeply interested in now.
For parents and future parents I will note that in contrast to PG's suggestion, having children has been a significant motivator and my best work has resulted in part from the desire to provide for them. It was also produced during the last 10 yrs that I have been a parent. I am far from any kind of genius or outlier however, and it seems likely that the time required to be one would conflict with the time spent raising children.
Overall, the evidence is that the brain is extremely pliable, that elite performers in any field put in many intensive hours of practice, and that to some extent their deep interest in their field developed over time. Perhaps conclusive research about the innateness of interest is out there. In the mean time, I also experiment with encouraging the depths of my children's interests.
I agree with you, but would go even further and say you're not born interested, the set of experiences you have are what shape your interest. It's both an important and useful idea to consider that people are born blank slates, and experiences drive us.
I have an obsessive personality and often become passionately absorbed by different things. I have worked as an artist and as a metallurgist and many things between. I have always (rightly) feared is that my constant switching has left me stretched.A Jack of all Trades but a master of none.
I am OK with that.
One of the stuble ways an obsession goes unnoticed, I believe, is due to schelp blindness [0].
For instance, a decade ago, I became super obsessed abt the state of emergency first-aid after going through harrowing experience of seeing one of my friends die stranded on a highway because the responders reached after 2 hours. Despite that, I never acted on it. I'm glad folks at http://gethelpnow.in (Uber for Ambulance) are going to fix it for India, and it is a great business opportunity too seeing how helpless and desperate the emergency situation really gets, compared to the West.
Speaking of ambulances, one of my cousins volunteers for the famed St. John's Ambulance Brigade [1] in Bombay and they were one of the first responders to the 2008 Bombay Terror Attacks [2]. Even though they're well funded and well-run for a non-profit, I firmly believe a for-profit business with skin-in-the-game would be able to provide more value.
I've been curious to the point of obsession abt a lot of things a lot of times and have seen numerous successful companies that were later built by sheer determination and rifle focus on solving the problem by the respective founding teams. When I see these companies (even in their infancy when success is not obvious), I have that urge to want to go work for them but end up stalking their progress instead, and that's because, I believe, I've been obsessed abt the problem they solve.
>a disinterested obsession with something that matters
Aha! It's official then, I'm a software architecture genius.
But seriously though, even if you're curious and obsessed, does that really make you a genius? You might be obsessed with general relativity but contribute nothing to the field.
The example of Darwin kind of glosses over the fact that naturalists were becoming interested in ideas about evolution. It was controversial and nobody had any real good ideas, but it’s not exactly true that Darwin had no idea where he was going with that.
Using the examples of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci (as depicted through Walter Isaacson’s biographies on them) it seems like the “opposite” may also be true. Being immensely curious about various subjects and applying them to one another would definitely have merit by the same examples PG is using in this article. One can definitely make the argument by saying Steve Jobs was obsessed with design - but i’m not sure it was an obsession with design as a discipline. The same with Leonardo can be said about painting, was the obsession to make his paintings better? Or was it just a culmination about being curious about many things?
So he's saying you have to have OCD to get anywhere, because that's what collecting bus tickets, or spotting trains is. It's a disorder. Calling it a theory is quite a stretch. And tacking on a bunch of "things" the theory says, is just stabbing at the dark.
"An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent anything can." - how I'd categorise the entire article. Ironically it's also an accurate categorisation of one's involvement in the Y Combinator Seed project: "to the extent anything can".
Let's encourage everyone to develop OCD for things that matter. Good luck with that.
> It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to predict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good time to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had been born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard of him.
This risk might be somewhat mitigated by the changing level of societal interest in different areas over time serving as a guide to interesting fields of study. If Darwin had been born earlier, surrounded by an entirely different set of books, writings, and people, he might also have been a lot less likely to be interested in natural history.
On the subject of encouraging kids to go deep and explore whatever they're interested in learning, I had that opportunity as a kid who homeschooled, and I think it benefited me a lot. Sure, I still had to spend some time learning things I was less interested in, like memorizing times tables, but I feel like the freedom to spend 50% or more of my time going deep and learning whatever I want (this is called "unschooling") did a huge amount to cultivate a lifelong love for learning that has served me well. It would have been hard to get that in public school.
This reminded my of a chapter from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman (or perhaps its sequel).
At one point he was burned out on physics. He took a break. One day he saw a juggler spinning plates on sticks (or something like that) and started working out the physics of it, just for fun. People asked him what that was good for and he said nothing, it's just interesting. One thing led to another, and that's how he ended up with his Nobel.
As I read the article I could really relate to being able to get really deep into a subject even though it might not be whats "popular" by society. I truly believe its very important for parents to let their kids "obsess" over things that might not "scale". At the same time, it's important that kids get deep into the things that they are interested in rather than just consume and waste their time.
Does something need a “result” to be genius? Isn’t most of mathematics abstract, so the reward is the discovery itself? But in physics a theory is not enough because it gets disproven and you are no longer a genius? I’d rather peg genius to the intellectual qualities and determination and focus, but say it’s still genius even if the result isn’t widely relevant to humankind or whatever people are interested in at that time.
Is there a place for people passionated but disinterested ? the mental burden of company structures forbids me to work there, but even if I do another job, I keep reading about combinatorics, trees and grammars on the side .. it's just an innate need I always had even as a small child (obviously not the combinatorics of grammatical structures .. just comtemplating and thinking about abstract ideas)
This is why basic research is so hard to manage. If a company is no longer interested in researching area X and instead wants to shift focus to area Y, there is no real alternative to outplacing the area X researchers and hiring new for area Y.
Trying to shift the interest of area X researchers only results in their coming up with rationalizations about how what they have been doing all along is somehow related to Y.
I was watching a video recently posted on 3Blue1Brown channel (https://youtu.be/Agbh95KyWxY)
He raises a very related point in his first answers. He attributes a certain playfulness and curiosity alongside expertise as some sort of necessary condition for paradigm-changing research.
Empirically, I'd say most progress is made not by geniuses, but regular joe-smo scientists and engineers attacking problems in their field for incremental gains in understanding. I tire of the hero worship and mythologies we place on genius when I know that most of the time genius just means right place right time on the shoulders of 'incremental' giants.
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell are good examples of this. Their obsessiveness with computers combined with the technology and market opportunities opening up - they were a product of their times. Like the great railroad magnates of the 1800's, they were essentially the same person (same schools, same upbringing) combined with obsession and opportunities.
The value judgments necessary to even construct the questions this essay tries to answer, kind of make the whole thing self-referential and self-fulfilling. Has "genius" been adequately defined before getting started? Has "great work?"
First we have the concept of an obsessive interest in something. But this apparently isn't "genius" unless the interest is in something that "matters." Matters to whom? The collecting of bus tickets matters to the bus ticket collector. People whose work a great number of people regard as great or genius, are by definition, working on things that a great number of people find important. Is it a voting thing, we need popularity? I thought our interest was disinterested.
Besides which, being obsessed with any single thing sounds suspiciously like the idea of a "calling," which I finally had to reject because I never had one. I had more like 6 things I was interested in. And I've pursued each, in turn, with a varying amounts of effort that in some cases could've been characterized as obsessive, but only for a time. I went deep but not long. And I got surprisingly far in each, in a shorter period of time than most people. In short, I suppose I'm a generalist, or you could uncharitably say, a dilettante. Am I not a "genius?" Have I not done "great work?" You can't answer, because I'm not popular, and you've never heard of me. I just want to point out in particular, that you can't answer "no." Genius and great work are all over the place out there, and they don't need to be acknowledged to be genius.
>Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets? It probably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because these people don't become famous.
Not everyone wants to become famous based on their interests. They just want to do what they enjoy. Their (non-) creative interest may pay dividends. Or it may not.
Those are incoherent ramblings of an underdeveloped brain. My advice: If you're going to obsess over something that may or may not be pointless, at least make it so that you're getting sordidly rich doing it. Maybe somebody notices that you made pointlessness a moot point and calls you a disruptive genius.
The greatest embodiment of this essay I've come across recently is a Korean artist named Kim Jung Gi, known for his ability to conjur up epic scenes with a brush pen. As well as his obsession with drawing.
Thank you, Paul Graham, on behalf of obsessive collectors everywhere! This also supports the ‘no free-lunch’ adage. There is merit in exploring uncharted territory, purely for the sake of it, but it is hard work with no guarantees of finding treasure except satisfaction of doing what you are interested in.
What strikes me as strange is that is intelligence provides so many fitness advantages (up to a point) why is there such wide variation in intelligence especially when there seems to be very little (negligible?) biological cost. One would think you’d be normally distributed around a much tighter range.
>But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to waste a lot of time.
>In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.
So true.
With highly capable instrumentation, each type of pursuit can often be seen as a potential lifetime effort so careful compromise needs to be made from the earliest time.
Musically, a singular focus on jazz, or classical, or pop music for instance can be the most legitimate path to top performance in a recognized idiom. Alternatively, other performers might spread themselves thinner between genres, sometimes only for practice or personal satisfaction by those whose professional performance is in a single genre itself.
And that's only recognized genres. What if the instrument itself still has more possibilities to offer?
A practioner (or hobbyist) could go off on a tanget, even a direction known from the outset not expected to be recognized, and whether it was a waste of time really depends.
It's possible that higher levels of performance can be achieved by greater development of instrument familiarity at the expense of focused musical practice that could have been accomplished in its place, and the outcome could be different than that which could be achieved otherwise.
Same goes for scientific instruments.
If you're going to break new ground, you're going to need to experiment.
And of course most experiments are going to fail, that's why they are called experiments.
To attempt completely avoiding having this type of failure waste any of your time whatsoever, you can simply try to never experiment, at least not in any way you are aware of.
But if you want to reach new milestones, you can't let that stop you, and since you are going to be going forward with many projects which will never be fruitful anyway, might as well include some with even less of an obvious chance.
You will best work harder and smarter than those focusing only on the recognized stuff, and can not become dependent on unbroken progress.
>If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
>AEinstein
I think bus ticket collecting was chosen as an example by the author exactly because starting a company about it is ridiculous to think about. So we can discuss just inner interest in something without thinking about outer reward.
Probably not... until some unexpected eureka moment comes.
What if bus tickets of certain style correlate to lower accident rates or more reliable schedules and no one else has noticed before?
What if a certain property of bus tickets is a predictor for some other societal result or economic trend in a way few would expect?
What if they are really tasty and nutritious but no one ever tried eating them?
Each one of these is farfetched enough that is no one is getting involved in collecting just to chase these possibilities. But only a collector, motivated by curiosity, is ever likely to catch them.
So it’s a feedback loop between ability and interest. With the two combined and progress registering people continue on. But what’s the wellspring of interest and is ability largely a gift or can it be cultivated?
I just wanted to say that I love pg's essays. Every time one of them is posted here I get excited because I know I'm going to read something very interesting. How can he be so consistently good?
> If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.
A big missing piece of the equation is wealth, or at least financial support. That gives a budding genius the freedom to pursue their interests, the ability to fail knowing that their life or livelihood doesn't hang in the balance.
Granted, sometimes genius begets wealth, but usually a person needs at least some support early in their life/career.
And then, who knows whether the wealth they accumulate (if they play their cards right) is enough to allow them to hit repeated dead-ends in pursuit of their disinterested obsession.
There's an aspect of this that strikes me as a little strange: the basic recommendation here seems substantially more to the benefit of society than to the individual who might be encouraged to cultivate their own genius by this method (or a parent in their kids).
> How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others overlook?
> So what matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because no one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can discover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.
> But if interest is a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivating interest, to cultivate genius.
> It may even be that we can cultivate a habit of intellectual bus ticket collecting in kids.
The main premise here is about the value of encouraging interest in essentially random topics (limited by some loose constraints from heuristics on "mattering"): it must be assumed that the majority of selections will be failures, with a rare critical exceptions. The structure of such a strategy is a very poor for any individual to adopt, but great for someone who might benefit by many other people adopting it.
According to the essay if you also happen to be talented then the selection should be less random—though the case of Newton here is a clear enough example that whatever reduction of randomness induced by talent, the possibilities of topic selection will still range widely enough to include ...undesirable picks. Additionally judging 'talent' is difficult enough that the practicality of using it as a criterion is pretty limited.
There is a cynical way of interpreting this—but it's not the one I have in mind. It seems to me more just a blind spot that most intellectuals have about the real value of genius. If you start by considering quality of life, it's not a great pick (going by the odds here, I mean; i.e. it's possible to be happy as an obsessive genius, but it's not the most likely outcome). Instead the value of genius tends to be axiomatic and not closely examined (I was that way for most of my life, too). When you look closer though, it's really most often to the benefit of society over the individual, and many of these people aren't fully aware of the tradeoffs involved in the sacrifice they're making (i.e. what sort of positive things show up in life when you aren't "driven" or obsessed by something).
I just hope parents consider this before going gung-ho with this method. It's at least a profoundly difficult moral question (imo).
Does this cover the implied subtext? He’s writing about it because a rentier class profits off of that obsession by maintaining an environment that encourages it even when it goes to far and harms the obsessor.
That’s what “something that matters” means.
Capital decides what matters. Bus tickets matter to the person collecting them. They don’t matter to an outside like Paul graham because they don’t result in capital.
...and then sold it all for $5 each or so. Plenty of folks have been there. The best case scenario at this point is finding your old HD/backup somewhere with that early-mined bitcoin wallet you had totally forgotten about.
Wow that was a very interesting analogy and theory. Thanks for sharing! I've also never heard of SSC before. I saw the top 10 posts SSC lists in the about page, but do you have any other recommendations for articles relevant to the HN crowd?
What I find interesting is these two contrasting undertones:
1) Geniuses who are obsessed with their own interests, not the outcome of pursuing their interest
2) PG obsessed with outcome (great work, being famous, leaving your mark on important topics, etc) and trying to control what you're interested in to affect the outcome.
The recipe for genius work is to be crazy obsessed. But according to the article, to be crazy obsessed with something is not something that you can necessarily control:
> Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. They didn't discover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising, but because they couldn't help it.
> But it may be that much of the skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in different things.
Yet there's also attempts to reason about how to control your own interests towards meaningful impact within the recognized limitations (that talent and interest both matter, and the implication is that some people just may not be born with talent or interest).
It reads like classical Greek Mythology - trying to fight against fate with the sheer force of will in the struggle to control how one leaves their mark on history.
Real geniuses ironically probably don't care about how to leave their mark on history. But on the other hand, being obsessed with leaving a mark on history may be a certain kind of genius as well.
I think the article could be improved by spending more time doing systems thinking rather than self optimization for the conclusion.
I think the self optimization part of the article (how to maximize your impact on history) does not yield much insight or conversation and hence reads poorly.
However, how to build systems (like educational systems) that increase the output of genius work seems much more promising direction for actionable insights but it is taken very lightly.
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Just because I have the thought.
The cognitive functions side of MBTI blends very well into an article like this. Cognitive functions states that there are things that we are more "innately interested in" than others, but instead of discrete topics, these are more like input senses.
Consider your 5 physical senses as inputs into your brain. Your brain usually notices or cares about some of them much more than others (Tone deaf vs perfect pitch). Some people "care" so much that every time a sense is violated, they will definitely let you know (what's that smell???).
Similarly, cognition can be viewed as inputs into your brain, and cognitive functions are the different senses into your brain. I'll list out a few:
Ti (introverted thinking) - the sense of whether something is factually right
Te (extroverted thinking) - the sense of whether something is systematically consistent
Fi (introverted feeling) - the sense of whether something induces harmony
Fe (extroverted feeling) - the sense of whether something creates harmonious society
etc.
Cognitive functions are split between what you take in as information and how you evaluate the information. The above is how you evaluate information. The following is how you take it in:
Ni (introverted intuition) - you notice ideas as complete building blocks within themselves
Ne (extroverted intuition) - you notice ideas as interconnecting with other ideas
Si (introverted sensing) - you notice the concrete world as complete experiences within themselves
Se (extroverted sensing) - you notice the concrete world as interconnecting with other experiences
Cognitive functions states that you have primary functions that you use to perceive the world, just like someone may notice sounds much more than touch or smell.
It suggests a vocabulary for talking about interest and obsession.
This seems to me that it applies so much to other aspects of life as well, not only for being "a genius". Perhaps this applies more to a particular subset of people who will think on this line.
For example, take the obsession and dial it down a little bit so it becomes a passion instead. Or even further so it becomes ordinary motivation. It becomes almost a linear scale that should match motivation with the effort you may need to achieve anything towards a particular direction. One may say, "that's common sense", but let's consider it anyway. Combine this with the fact that with any field, the further you go outwards, the more effort you will need to take another step. This is similar to the energy you will need to accelerate further, once you reach a particular speed. The faster you go, the more energy you need to go even faster.
In order to start anything that may have enough of a struggle, we need to have enough of a motivation to have started it. Otherwise, when the times get tough and we face a brick wall, we can remind ourselves of that initial motivation to be brave enough to even consider running through that wall head-first even if it may hurt us in the short term. Ideally we should have tools or other people to help us in this task but when it comes to many unexplored areas of science, or even starting our own company, these tools or other people are not so available to us, therefore it is likely we will need that determination to allow us to do that sacrifice. Luckily, these tools/people problems are being resolved more and more every day. But, the further we go, the more we will need, so the thought still applies with the same effect, forever.
There should also be an expanding curiosity aspect to it, too. You have touched on this with being interested in different things. However, we need to actively keep in mind how these different things may be related to each other, perhaps literally, perhaps at a more abstract level. This way, we can continue our exploration of both by using these overlaps as foundations for new land between those landmasses. So that we will not need a complete context switch to consider the different subjects, but we keep building more bridges between them. I like to consider the metaphors of the steam engine to help describe the mind. I am unsure if Freud came up with these connections but they helped expand our minds about what it thinks about itself anyway.
So, does it mean, we are excused to say "follow your dreams"? I believe so. There may be a lot of other people who will say "that is foolish, you will struggle to live". If you look at the bigger picture and say, let's take that seriously: if 100 people try to follow their dreams and only 1 make it while the rest of the 99 suffer. The more you encourage, the more you make that 100 a 1000, and the 1 a 10. The 99 becomes 990. Now, the question becomes, is it worth it? You can guess my answer to this but I will leave it unanswered with the hopes to further discussion.
I'm not sure it's a given that natural talent is even part of the equation. A decent number of the behavioral economics who have written popular books (Grit, Peak, to name a few) seem to be converging on the idea that talent isn't really worth discussing as a prerequisite to greatness.
That especially follows if you consider the luck factor mentioned in this article; is it really talent to have a unique way of looking at a topic that moves the topic forward? Or is the uniqueness merely a factor of the set of experiences a person just happens to bring to bear on a problem?
I say this because far too many people get caught up on talent, trying to find what their talent is, when they'd be much more productive simply obsessing.
