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Comment by chpmrc | Hacker News Reader

This assumption that you either excel at something or you should just do something else is as dumb as saying that you either become a billionaire or you might as well live on the streets.

Just because marketing the top 1% is easier doesn't mean the rest is crap. Just because you won't be the next Bill Gates doesn't mean you shouldn't start (and enjoy building) your own software company.

Even the 10k hours theory doesn't explain why some people can practice for so long but others can't. So, clearly, we all start at different positions in life.

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I agree, and I'd like to add that what one does with/after those 10000 hours matters too, i.e. the individual factor. There's not just a large range between all-or-nothing, but there are many different "alls" too.

As an example: I am a good guitar player. I've put in probably close to 10000 hours. But lots of guitar players can play and come up with things I never could. And lots of guitar players can't play or come up with some of the things I can.

There simply isn't one sort of top guitar player, or composer, or inventor. There are lots of ideas, shades and colours, different solutions to all sorts of problems. It helps to know your area of expertise, but a truckload of Bill Gates / Bach / Rembrandt clones wouldn't be able to come up with all the novel ideas and creative solutions a more diverse set of people with their own individual quirks could.

Individuals bring things to the table that can't be put that easily into a quantifiable number; most real life problems are more complex in nature than an Olympic race where there's a clear winner and way to win. I think it's at least as important in life to find out in which ways you are unique and can make (some modicum of) a difference.

Feynman told a story about his "one extra trick". He ascribed a certain amount of his mathematical prowess to simply knowing an uncommon integration trick that most of his colleagues did not. So when they failed to solve an integral, they would bring it to him, and some of the time, using his one extra trick, he would solve it, dazzling everyone.

Which is not to say that his one extra trick was particularly powerful, or widely applicable, but it was unusual, and it produced a difference in ability. Maybe Feynman couldn't solve more integrals than his colleagues, but he could integrate different ones, which made him useful and "smart".

Which in turn brings up the nature/nurture question of genius: to what extent is genius a matter of "innate" skill (in this case, that arises either from the circumstances of your birth or life) and how much of it is a quirk of your education, the one extra trick you learned (or didn't) that make you approach problems in a way different than your peers?

This is a good story, and it's worth noting that Feynman reiterated the idea of building a repertoire of techniques or problems in several different ways.

Here are two:

The way to excel in physics, according to Feynman, was to have several unsolved problems in the back of your mind, waiting for new information to spark an insight.

Feynman reports that fraternity kids at the university he attended would be taught slick answers to classic questions like "why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down" -- a kind of repertoire of responses that was part of their initiation.

Creativity doesn't come out of nowhere, it's a cumulative thing.

I agree up to a point. Certainly the implication you should not continue doing something if a) you think it's fun and/or b) you think it's important seems wrongheaded to me and not a very fun way to go through life. I'm never going to be as smart as Andrew Ng, but I still have fun building ML systems and pipelines.

That said, there are times when I've given up and felt like it was the right thing to do. I went to a pretty good school for Physics because I was sure that was what I wanted to do with my life. After 2-3 years, through no lack of effort on my part, it was just super clear I wasn't going to make the cut--I just didn't have it. I worked hard and got okay grades, but as the material got harder, it was just plain to see who was separating from the pack and those kids just had something I never would, and hard work wasn't going to do it. If I didn't put in 10k hours, I came damned close.

I dropped Physics as a major, switched to Math, dropped the idea of academia as a career and have never looked back. An honest look at one's talents relative to peers and competitors is still important.

Not only that, but even though you might not become a world-famous pianist, trying to learn the instrument might lead you to different places, such as building or tuning pianos, for example.

In other words, there are so many more tasks and abilities in the world than just those we hear about, and paths expand into a lot more skills than you could possibly consider to exist. Everyone could be a specialist in a very niche area (or many), but they need to know those exist in the first place.

So, try things. As many as you can, because you'll never know where that will lead you.

>excel at something or you should just do something else

To quote G.K. Chesterton: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

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