I find the mentions of Messi, Newton, Mozart and Wodehouse bizarre. The essay is similar to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour theory, whether you agree or not, at worst Gladwell is writing a journalistic think piece. Here though, is Graham credibly putting himself in the same category as Mozart? Dropping a reference to Patrick Collison, who no one outside of tech would have a clue who that is in the same breath as you n…
“I’m a successful businessman. This is how I acted. So did these other successful business people. And as a matter of fact, some of the greats of history in other fields also acted like this. Put together, I think that this behavior is conducive to success (in the way I define it).”
Personally, I find it much more useful to go into each of these reads to find some piece of something I can incorporate into my life.
I don’t think it’s particularly useful to disparage the author. In this case, I don’t think he has a megalomaniacal belief in his legacy as a luminary, but even if he did, I trust my ability to extract information from what he writes.
There’s also a meta-discussion here. In human speech a common technique is to use X_j (j=1..n) diverse objects that each have k (k=1..m) characteristics Y={Y_jk} where for each j, there exists some k such that you can form a subset Z of Y which has the property that for any y_1, y_2 in Z, |m(y_1)-m(y_2)|Usually, the idea is that the diversity in X_j resulting in this form of Z points to some commonality among the elements of Z. The idea is usually not that all Y_jk are in an equivalence class but that the subset Z is in a single equivalence class.
To put it more plainly through illustration: Messi, the fifty year old drunk Sunday leaguer, and I all choose to warm up before games to avoid injuries. This indicates that perhaps the warming up is a good idea. What it does not indicate is whether Messi, dad, and I are equivalent across all our characteristics. In fact, the interesting part is that we aren’t but that we share this.