> How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others overlook?
> So what matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because no one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can discover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.
> But if interest is a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivating interest, to cultivate genius.
> It may even be that we can cultivate a habit of intellectual bus ticket collecting in kids.
The main premise here is about the value of encouraging interest in essentially random topics (limited by some loose constraints from heuristics on "mattering"): it must be assumed that the majority of selections will be failures, with a rare critical exceptions. The structure of such a strategy is a very poor for any individual to adopt, but great for someone who might benefit by many other people adopting it.
According to the essay if you also happen to be talented then the selection should be less random—though the case of Newton here is a clear enough example that whatever reduction of randomness induced by talent, the possibilities of topic selection will still range widely enough to include ...undesirable picks. Additionally judging 'talent' is difficult enough that the practicality of using it as a criterion is pretty limited.
There is a cynical way of interpreting this—but it's not the one I have in mind. It seems to me more just a blind spot that most intellectuals have about the real value of genius. If you start by considering quality of life, it's not a great pick (going by the odds here, I mean; i.e. it's possible to be happy as an obsessive genius, but it's not the most likely outcome). Instead the value of genius tends to be axiomatic and not closely examined (I was that way for most of my life, too). When you look closer though, it's really most often to the benefit of society over the individual, and many of these people aren't fully aware of the tradeoffs involved in the sacrifice they're making (i.e. what sort of positive things show up in life when you aren't "driven" or obsessed by something).
I just hope parents consider this before going gung-ho with this method. It's at least a profoundly difficult moral question (imo).