But should the bus ticket collector start a company around bus tickets or should it remain a hobby?
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
41–50 of 500 posts
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#42Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
For me, no, I don't think I can do that. For years I've been doing the "Electronics is cool, I should learn more about it but not today" routine. Now, I started doing some heavy research into solar energy, for purely practical reasons, and I'm finally actually interested in electronics and learning. I can't seem to summon interest in something unless I see at least a little bit of practical use for myself. I think one of the reasons is that learning is too abstract, unless connected to a particular problem I'm trying to solve.
With electronics, the issue is that yes it sounds very cool but I just didn't see what I could do with the knowledge. Sure, I'll buy an arduino and have it water my pot flower but that's utterly boring and useless.
But with solar energy systems, there are a lot of intricacies and compromises and learning electronics is very rewarding.
The downside is that I seem to lose interest very quickly, once I solve my particular problem. But I still learn a lot and have fun in the meantime.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#43The example of Darwin kind of glosses over the fact that naturalists were becoming interested in ideas about evolution. It was controversial and nobody had any real good ideas, but it’s not exactly true that Darwin had no idea where he was going with that.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#44What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone? For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
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Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#45But should the bus ticket collector start a company around bus tickets or should it remain a hobby?
I think bus ticket collecting was chosen as an example by the author exactly because starting a company about it is ridiculous to think about. So we can discuss just inner interest in something without thinking about outer reward.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#46Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
One way is to enter a competition with others. Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors. Incidentally, many cool things seem to spring out of some kind of a "scene" (which is defined by this friendly competition among its members).
> Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors.
Eh, I had a large collection. I still have a collection of a few hundred tickets (not worth much, a few hundred pounds). I started the collection in about 1997. I stopped in about 2003. I've never shown other collectors my tickets, and I've only put about 5 tickets online and that was only this year.
I think for this obsessional collecting it's really not about other people. It's about systematizing and categorising the world. Outside is chaos and confusion. In here, with this collection, there is order and control.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#47One of the stuble ways an obsession goes unnoticed, I believe, is due to schelp blindness [0].
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
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#48What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone? For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
Bits and bytes, how they are layed out, transferred, read and written. Can't stop thinking of data structures
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#49Having done passion projects for 15 years, the elephant in the room is: Do you have dependents and do they support you? At some point in time, your worthless obsession will feel like selfishness to your dependents and yourself. Its a material world after all. This is a great article, but a reality check will be helpful!
He talked about children in the article. And also, work that matters generally doesn’t leave a genius starving: it’s the difference between obsessive interest into things that matter and bus ticket collecting.
You could of course be at the point where you started too late and you haven’t time to ramp up useful work into successful outcomes through obsessiveness, as you already have dependents. Or you could be in the unlucky edge he talks about of people who only went down the wrong paths due to risks turning out wrong.
But I believe the article did address all of your points.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#50What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone? For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
Fellow physicist-by-training. Got interested in "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" a few years ago. As I delve into the roots of the field, I increasingly feel that many interesting ideas seem to have been discarded without justification other than the field switching en masse to a different fad at some instant. Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see anyone else be…
Yes to cybernetics. Its day will come again! If you go deep, it's a rabbit hole to discover why teleology in science is so controversial. Wiener said cybernetics started from the idea that Intelligence is all about decreasing local entropy.