These past few months, I have been slowly working through the audiobook version of Steven Strogatz' Infinite Powers. The work is enjoyable exactly because there's a bit of effort made to breathe life into the names everyone remembers. For example, Strogatz describes Archimedes as being so "neglectful of his person" that he had to be dragged to the bath; the irony being that one of the most famous anecdotes about him was a discovery he figured out in the bath. This is extra delightful to me since the beginning of my career was spent supporting these absent-minded professor types. I clearly remember realising that the path ahead of me was not going to result in some obvious legacy, despite whatever ambitions I had, but I could fix Dr Gell-Mann's printer. The working printer seemed to make him very happy, and I decided that was good enough. In 250 BC, someone just like me made sure Archimedes was clean and fed.
This post is pretty old, and I'm curious why it's been put up here today and what sort of conversation mmphosis was hoping for. To me, it reads as a half-considered opinion. Could it be that the siren song of ambition and personal legacy is a nice little perk if you can afford it? Is there a counter argument to be made that if you can't keep your personal shit together, you obviously lack the discipline required to turn those deep-thinky thoughts into a legacy? Are we taking digs at how the progress 2-3 productive coders make in the early, dark hours of a startup loses steam as it tries to scale? Anyone of these conversations overlooks a pretty crucial idea, which is potentially a more productive conversation in itself: how do we find and conscript those people who will fix our printers, run our errands, and generally work to move objects out of our way while we follow our delight? Do we have to occasionally treat their fiddly petitions for reassurance with respect, as a sort of payment for their efforts or do we simply assume that being around greatness is enough?