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.
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.