[pmoriarty]

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success."

  -- Thomas Edison

"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lives solely in my tenacity."

  -- Louis Pasteur

"Men give me credit for genius; but all the genius I have lies in this: When I have a subject on hand I study it profoundly."

  -- Alexander Hamilton

[balabaster]

I can't believe that it's coincidence that every person I've ever come across that has been proclaimed a genius at whatever has had this very same sentiment to express.

There was a grain of talent and a moment of inspiration that led to a dogged pursuit of their interest.

People are quick to write it off as "oh, they had talent" or "oh they were a genius", but I'm reasonably confident given the number of amazing people I've met in this industry, everyone (well, everyone that's not an egotist) that's ever had this label attributed to them will attest: The talent comes from the countless hours of work, effort and frustration put into realizing that talent. It's only once we've overcome this effort and frustration and others think we make it look easy that they say "Oh, but you had talent"... sure, but I didn't have any to start with. Now after 10,000 hours of practice, of countless nights of going to bed frustrated that I couldn't understand something or make my fingers work right, of the number of times I played until my fingers and lips bled all in the pursuit of mastering whatever it is I'm trying to master. Only then does everyone see this talent. I don't see talent, all I see is the hard work to get where I am now and how far I still have left to go to consider myself part of the circle I still think are better or more accomplished than me. Any "talent" I may exhibit is the product of the pursuit of my interest.

My talent, my genius if you will is nothing more than this. I am not a genius. I am no more intelligent than has the capacity of any other that has the tenacity to stick with it through the basics and learn the fundamentals and go through the mental and physical pain that I have endured to get here.

[imgabe]

Nobody ever mentions the counterexample, assuming it exists - the person who spends thousands of hours practicing but never gets anywhere. How many Salieris are there for each Mozart?

There's definitely a need for hard work in order to have success, but perhaps there's something necessary that has to be present for the hard work to build upon. Maybe that something is "genius".

[michaelcampbell]

> How many Salieris are there for each Mozart?

And if Mozart hadn't been there, at that time; would we not be speaking of Salieri as the genius? Perhaps.

[mrcactu5]

What about Lady Gaga? (Stefani Germanotta)

Article says she was part of this study.

[ZenoArrow]

Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity. You can refine something with hard work, but broadening your horizons comes from a desire to see what can be done. Basically, do you want to create a refined version of what's already been done, or do you want to explore what's possible. You can alternate between them to push in both directions, but the mindset is different.

[AStellersSeaCow]

>Hard work is overrated. What you really want is curiosity.

This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.

Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.

I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.

[ZenoArrow]

> "they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques"

This could easily be attributed to curiosity. Don't dismiss curiosity as something wishy-washy.

As I said before, the mindset between hardworking and curious is different. That's not to say pursuing curiosity takes no effort. I'll use a musician analogy to explain. A hardworking musician works hard to master their skill and knowledge with an instrument in order to maximise their abilities. A curious musician by contrast is guided by much broader principles, including a greater focus on sound rather than their personal skill. A playing mistake that produces an interesting result is not something to be eliminated by refinement, but instead is the opening of a new avenue of inquiry. It helps to be open to interesting mistakes, and this is not something that is easy to do when you're hyper focused on perfecting yourself.

In other words, spending energy is necessary to get a fuller understanding of something, but what motivates you does have an impact on the end result. Hard work is driven by ego, playful curiosity less so, but it doesn't mean less energy. Work and play are not the same thing, but what separates them is not the activity per se, but rather the mindset of the individual.

[balabaster]

> Hard work is driven by ego

I have a sample size of one that says this is false. For me at least, hard work comes from one of a number of things, none of which are ego.

1. The desire to deliver what I set out to deliver by the deadline I promised. I made a promise and I was raised that a man is only as good as his word. So unless you have a compelling reason why delivery is not an option, you see it through.

2. The desire for the satisfaction of looking at something that will pay future dividends, like learning to grow my own food takes hard work now, but at the end of it, I have a garden full of "free" food. Edit: On reflection, this one may be the most likely candidate for being ego - the ability to stand back and say proudly "I did that"... I will concede, this is probably ego.

3. The desire to master something I haven't yet mastered that either satisfies my fascination or because understanding it will enhance or simplify my life in the future - like small engine repair. I could easily take it to a shop and have them do it, but I'd rather learn how to do it myself because down the road there may be no shop nearby or I may just have to make do and improvise. If I don't work hard and spend the time and effort to understand the fundamentals and principles that make it all work, I wouldn't stand a chance.

So hard work isn't always about ego. The hard work may be fueled by curiosity, or it may be fueled by necessity. Certainly curiosity makes the hard work seem more like play than work, but that doesn't make it any less work. It just means that you don't realize how much effort you're putting in and it really just feels like an amusing way of playing or wasting time, but it's still work.

[AStellersSeaCow]

You seem to be mixing and matching hardworking vs. curious, incremental improvement vs. innovation, and results-oriented vs. process-oriented, all of which are completely different topics.

Saying hard work is ego driven while curiosity has some more noble, ineffable motivation is the exact same sort of BS I was decrying before. Hard work can just as well be driven by a sense of responsibility, a desire for more predictable outcomes, or faith, while curiosity/playfulness can be an ego-saving measure to offset mediocrity that the person can't or won't work past. Neither is more morally right, imo.

But to meander back to the core of the discussion, I don't think it's possible to become notably good at anything without at least some motivation towards self-improvement and foundational skills. People who ride playfulness and curiosity into lasting renown are able to do so because they have some degree of mastery of the fundamentals. Some people manage to earn lasting renown without much curiosity or playfulness, just a single-minded drive towards mastering known techniques.

Few to no people have ever earned lasting renown by noodling around in a field they had zero grounding in until they randomly struck gold. Some have earned infamy with that approach, but that's a different topic.

[OneSprings2Mind]

Stanislaw Ulam, Louis de Broglie

[hinkley]

I think it's two sides of a coin here. When someone asks me how I fixed some obscure bug or crazy performance issue, I will say something like 'I was the last one to give up on it'.

You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.

Is that tenacity? Curiosity? Some of each?

[balabaster]

Usually this is a combination of thousands of hours learning to understand how things work and how they break under certain circumstances. Once you get to a certain point, your ability to make the mental leap from the symptom to the cause can just be a feeling in your gut that seems to lead you uncannily to the right place, but you discount what it took to get you there. Is it tenacity that mean you were the last one to give up on it or is that just stubbornness because "fuck this shit, I'm not going to be beaten by a fucking computer!" <- That's me.

[_0ffh]

While curiosity might be what causes you to work hard, it's still the work itself that produces the results. Although if you're lucky it might not feel very much like work! :)

[balabaster]

That something usually less genius and more a grain of inspiration followed by a love of the process, followed by a ton of hard work to get to a point that the instrument is an extension of the musician's soul.

I will concede that this may not always be the case. Of course, there are a thousand Salieris for every Mozart. But when you set out, you don't set out to become Salieri. When you play in an orchestra, you don't spend your life striving to play second fiddle and you certainly don't just get to sit down in the principal violin spot because you're a genius. You work for it, just like the guy who earned his right to be on that podium leading the orchestra.

For everything that's wrong with the movie Whiplash, there is a lot of nuance that it captures really well regarding the personalities in orchestras and what it really takes to get to the top of your game.

[Joof]

Not surprising. A lot of us probably qualify or come very close and the deciding factor is how much effort we expend to get there.

Meanwhile, I've got friends that live on welfare and legitimately couldn't understand neural networks (or even algebra) if they spent their whole lives dedicated to it. They are still excellent people, but perhaps mathematics isn't their best subject.

The guy I have in mind is an incredible impressionist and comedian, I wish he had more confidence in his talents.

[balabaster]

also, I've yet to see anyone spending thousands of hours on productive practice and not get anywhere. Conversely, you can spend thousands of hours practicing a shitty golf swing and you're not going to get anywhere but an over-practiced shitty golf swing. Without correction and enforcing good technique and good habits at every practice, you're not going to get anywhere fast if at all.

Music is a bit of a poor example for application to "genius" actually because just like a golf swing much of it is in the practice of your gross and fine motor skills and good technique, which as we all know, if you don't rigorously practice good habits, you may as well not bother practicing at all because you're actively going in the wrong direction.

[ThePawnBreak]

There is always a bell curve. It's more obvious in fields where people start practicing from a tender age, like chess or music, where you start learning when you're around 4. There are many who dedicate their lives to such pursuits, but very few become Kasparov or Mozart. The others still become extremely good, but not the best, and most are forgotten by history.

[balabaster]

But to be honest, you don't need to be Mozart to be considered a musical genius today... There are a dozen orchestral genii alive today that could easily outstrip the genius of Mozart when you compare the body of their orchestral work. Yet when these composers are dead and gone, 30, 40, 50 years from now, everyone will still be talking about Mozart, and todays better-than-Mozarts will be lost to the sands of time. It's quite sad how biased our filters are really.

[seizethecheese]

Perhaps true geniuses know the social value of humility.

[balabaster]

...or perhaps they're totally unaware of the existence of genius. Perhaps if they realized what they were attempting required genius they'd never have attempted it in the first place for fear that they didn't have the genius necessary to succeed.

[AStellersSeaCow]

Haha, no way. I've worked with or met a half dozen MacArthur fellows, and none of them were shy about bringing up that fact. You could argue that MacArthur selects for self-promoting geniuses, but such creatures clearly do exist.

[seizethecheese]

Exception that proves the rule.

How do you know if someone you met went to Harvard? They already told you.

[balabaster]

This I've found over the years is more a product of insecurity than of ego or genius. People quick to tout their alumnus or IQ... or indeed any other measure of intelligence in such a manner are looking for validation and acceptance of their superiority because it satisfies their insecurity.

Though, I would have given my right arm to go to MIT earlier in my life, just for access to MITs professors, forget the degree.

[sovietmudkipz]

> True geniuses know the social value of humility.

Wouldn't you have to be a genius to be able to make such an evaluation?

[Retra]

That's not an evaluation, it's just a statement. Some genius could have just told them that.

[ARothfusz]

Genius does not emerge solely from tenacity. Genius comes from figuring out new things to try in pursuit of a goal over a long period of time.

If you tried something and failed, how many permutations could you go through before you ran out of ideas of what to try? Could you do it for _years_? Could you keep trying, learning from your mistakes for a lifetime, until you reached your goal? Maybe you're a genius then.

[balabaster]

Why not? Anyone could if the pursuit was worth it to them.

All it takes is being able to look at things and wonder "how could I apply this along with what I already know to achieve that goal?" Eventually you'll have some permutation of ideas that work. Even if you put it down and come back to it many years later. Maybe the goal isn't obvious until one day all the ideas come together to solve a problem that you need solved right now that yesterday you'd never even had cause to think about. That doesn't negate the work you did learning those things.

"Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid." - Einstein

[AIMunchkin]

My favorite Edison quote:

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

[KaneMorgan]

Saying I worked hard is a more comforting story than saying I was lucky. I think people are likely to put more value on hard work than its due.

[civilian]

I think that what successful people tell themselves is not that important of an issue. What's important is the narrative we give people who are not yet successful.

I have a friend who's smart, and is a really good listener. We have really good philosophical conversations, and he kicks my ass at board games. I've been wanting him to get into programming, because right now he's working as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop chain. He absolutely has the talent to understand programming, but he has never put an ounce of effort into it. He really likes the idea of making 50k/yr (which would essentially be a doubling of his salary) so he could be less depressed about finances.

I offer him help... I tell him how I self-trained into programming, without a C.S. degree. And he just has a total lack of effort, and I think that he just tells himself that he can't do it.

When we establish the narrative that the only barrier is hard work, then we ought to be able to motivate people because they'll recognize that most things are within their reach with enough determination.

[beachstartup]

i have friends like this.

trust me, you're not going to convince him.

he's probably going to just do nothing, for a long time, and tell you how lucky you are every time you visit.

[pmoriarty]

I have two counter-examples for you. I had two friends like this. I convinced them to learn programming while they were working menial jobs. Both of them did, and went on to have successful careers in the tech field.

I have a story of failure too. Two other frends expressed interest in learning to program, and I tried to teach them C while I was learning it myself. Big mistake. They quit after the first very intense and long lesson. I think I threw them in to the deep end of the pool, trying to teach them C as their first exposure to programming (when I myself didn't even know C and was learning along with them).

In the successful cases first mentioned above, both of my friends taught themselves languages they were interested in, at their own pace, and in their spare time (what little there was of it). They were also clearly very motivated, which my other two friends may not have been.

Moral of the story: I think it all depends on the student, the teacher, what they're trying to learn, how they're learning, how they're taught, and how motivated they are. You can't just generalize and say it'll work for everyone or not work for everyone.

The successes make me cautiously optimistic and I will personally try to help people again, if given the chance, despite there being no guarantee that it will work. In fact, I'd still try to help even every one of my previous attempts had failed.

[civilian]

Awesome to hear! So are you like, 2 for 4 as a mentor? That's much better than my 1 for 5. I have another teaching-inclined buddy who is 0 for 10.

I have remained optimistic, but yeah.. I do my best just to casually mention it to everyone that it's possible to get into, and that I'm always available as a resource.

[beachstartup]

OP was talking about repeated attempts to help the same person.

[eutectic]

So we should be willing to lie if it makes a better story?

[chillwaves]

I'm not sure how you got that idea from the post you are responding to.

[civilian]

I kind of understand how he got that. I do genuinely believe that hard work is the key to everything (although you do often need a little intelligence), but the way I talked was about what story would best help motivate people. It just helps that the two things match up.

I mean, imagine a world where I talked to my friend and was just like: "oh yeah. You're not smart enough. You never finished any bachelor degree. And I guess you could get into it anyway if you have been born into the upper class, but you weren't. There's no reason to try for anything better, you'll just fail." I'd be a pretty bad friend by modern standards.

[replicatorblog]

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."—Calvin Coolidge

[forgotmysn]

Sounds like an epic humblebrag by Hamilton. I don't think anyone, then or now, thinks he was a genius.

[omginternets]

I don't think he's using genius to mean "a genius". I think it's instead meant as a term for "a bright idea". i.e.: "to have genius" vs "to be a genius".

[pjmorris]

I am curious about how you come by your view. Have a look at this defense [0] of Hamilton on the $10. I can see from it how many could see him as a genius.

[0] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/pl...

[cfmcdonald]

He is saying he has been credited with genius, that is intellectual power or talent, not that he has been credited with being "a genius". The former is now an archaic way of using genius, the latter was pretty new in Hamilton's time.

[habitue]

Alexander Hamilton was definitely super smart. Read his biography, it's nuts how young he was while he was writing treatises that shaped world events

[karma_vaccum123]

Right...many people seem to confuse genius with being really smart.