The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is doing the same thing like everyone else. Competition might actually force you to come up with a different approach.

What in life is not a competition?

What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.

> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.

Not true.

There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players

And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.

Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that

From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.

My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.

At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.

Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?

Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.

But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.

It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff

I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging.

I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an excuse for antisocial behavior.

Here’s the thing. If you’re so brilliant, you should be able to learn basic social skills, manners, and hygiene. It’s not that hard. And if you do find it hard, maybe it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.

> That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.

Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dani_(footballer,_born_1976)

Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.

Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.

Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.

Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.