The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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 ;)

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.

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?

For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.

Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also one of those things anyone can do if only...?

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.

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".

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!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Incentive_theories:...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

and a tool recently mentioned here for evaluating bets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

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.

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?"

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.

"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."

"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.

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.

Just a thought.

Going deep on a topic seems like great advice with kids, and I wish schools allowed for more of it.

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.

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.

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 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'.

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.

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.

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.

In any case, it is always easier said than done.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Ambulance

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks

'Stay hungry. Stay foolish.'

https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/

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.

"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.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1198189199641452544

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.

Great people are almost never good people and I'd rather be good than great.

Heisenberg: suddenly realized he had to study physics on a bike when he was a teenage boy.

Einstein: was driven by Mach's teenage vision of a metaphysics of pure relativity.

Souriau (mathematician): would come up with new concepts in dreams.

Voevodsky: would get mathematical insights by talking to DMT-like entities (but did not consume DMT).

de Maillet (discovered sea level varied across millenia): had an angel tell him he had a destiny and would do great discoveries.

Etc...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://youtu.be/aoqu5SEFqRI

>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

Edit: I'm always surprised by which of my posts get the downvotes. Wonder whom I'm offending this time.

I don't know, but now I want to put some thought into it.

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.

> 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).

Or what about dangerous obsessions, like power?

Cf John Holt.

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.

-Einstein

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.

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.