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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget "mile-wide inch-deep" generalist geniuses. They aren't particularly gifted in one area, but are able to achieve simultaneous competency in a very large number of discrete disciplines. We used to call these folks "Renaissance Men", but the recognition of excessive achievement in specialties has virtually eliminated recognition for that kind of intellect.

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Those people tend to become business multimillionaires.

Not so. Renaissance people (there are a few, even today) tend to end up underemployed. If you want to be a "business multimillionaire", you go the opposite way. You focus, you narrow yourself, but you have to focus on something that can actually make you money (i.e. not medieval history).

Why are most of the true Renaissance people underemployed, obscure, and financially mediocre? It's because the only thing that can tell a polymath from a dabbler is time.

Success in life is more correlated with ambition than with knowledge: an average educated but very ambitious person have more probabilities of being successful than a super smart individual that is ambitious but about knowledge and ideals, not money.

If you link this lack of focus in taking profit from your actions in life with a master in a struggling field, you are on your way to an underachiever life. That's me.

That probably depends if your definition of "success" is centred around "money" or around "happiness". (Or some other factor that I haven't considered).

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