Natalie Portman - Scientist

I know it's (barely) related to the current thread, but Queen has an astrophysicist as a lead guitarist... Face it, some people can pull this multi-discipline s*ht off.

James Franco is very impressive as well. From his Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Franco#Personal_life :

Franco has been described as having "an unusually high metabolism for productivity...a superhuman ability to focus". Dissatisfied with his career's direction, Franco reenrolled at UCLA in the fall of 2006 as an English major with a creative writing concentration. Having received permission to take as many as 62 course credits per quarter compared to the normal limit of 19 while continuing to act, he received his undergraduate degree in June 2008 with a GPA over 3.5.

He moved to New York to simultaneously attend graduate school at Columbia University's MFA writing program, New York University's Tisch School of the Arts for filmmaking,and Brooklyn College for fiction writing, while occasionally commuting to North Carolina's Warren Wilson College for poetry.[1] He received his MFA from Columbia in 2010. Franco is a Ph.D. student in English at Yale University and will also attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

Nice article.

Two sentences jumped out at me.

First:

“There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

then:

If anything, stories like Ms. Portman’s show that great success, like DNA, is constructed of a few basic building blocks: tenacity, focus, and the old Woody Allen line about just showing up.

No question about the importance of things like hard work, tenacity, focus, not taking anything for granted, and just showing up. We all have to do these things.

The phrase that really got me thinking was "intellectual horsepower". What is that? And how important is that?

I used to be awfully hasty in judging others, "She is really smart," or "He is so stupid". Then I learned alot from my first mentor. He taught that there often isn't much difference between someone who appears smart and someone who doesn't. Perhaps no one spent enough time with them. Maybe they have other challenges, like family, health, or circumstances. Maybe they're just a fish out of water, spending too much time on things that don't interest him. Or maybe they appear dumb because they actually believe that they are. They've been told so many times that they now believe it.

At first, he sounded like some hippie idealist. But the more we worked together, the more his teachings manifested themselves in the people we worked with. People who appeared dumb blossomed under different circumstances all the time. The were smart deep down inside where no one ever explored. (These people were mostly hourly workers who knew way more than their bosses about running the business.)

To this day, when I see phrases like, "intellectual horsepower", I cringe. We "smarties" aren't that much smarter than most other people, if we are at all.

And just to stay humble, remember: we're all just one head injury from blissful ignorance.

Have a look at Guy Steele's interview with Fran Allen in a recent CACM--John Cocke was fond of beer, and people used to covet his bar napkins, on which he would sketch out new ideas.

Brian May's story is pretty impressive. He left school while pursuing his PhD when Queen became popular. Over 30 years later he finished his studies and obtained his degree.