The author concludes that "I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength, [and] do more of what comes naturally." Something I found was that sometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are _not_ the things that are strengths. But they have become strengths. Today, I would consider myself to be an OS and systems programmer person. It was abjectly _not_ something that came to me naturally. To understand assembly language, C, and other things, and gain any sort of a proper grasp on, it took years. Sometimes, I tell people how long it took me and how much I struggled, and they are bewildered that I found these subjects so difficult. But I did.
However, my motivating factor was my interest in the subject, not my innate strength in it, and that has pushed me to study it and become strong enough that I can (hopefully, I'm still in college!) succeed in that space.
There are subjects where I could probably succeed if I tried harder and effusively sweated blood (probably pure math related). Pure math is one of those things I just suck at. But the difference is that I don't find it personally interesting, and so the burden of learning and building talent feels infinitely more overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent. Sometimes I also wonder if my "lack of innate talent" is that actually "I generally learn more slowly." But maybe learning more slowly helps me learn things more deeply as well. Who knows.
* As a side note, the quote I was told is "if you want to be known as a dog killer, you should kill dogs."
Well, the absolutely best-case scenarios is when you both have an innate talent for something and deep interest/obsession about it; I think that the article encourages you to find exactly that and then focus on it, because once you combine innate talent + obsession, you do have unfair advantage over the others
I also think it's not super easy to evaluate whether you have an innate talent for something. The example of Ramanujan reading math textbooks when he was twelve is definitely an exceptional case, but I also think it's not clear to a lot of twelve year olds that such deep resources in a subject even exist. I was lucky that my county's library system had a literal treasure trove of computer science related books that I could check out as a tween and teen, so I was exposed to a subject before most people were.
If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.
But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.
> If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
Only if you have the interest and aptitude to dig in. Compare this with OP's story about trying to learn music instruments at an early age, and his brother. Like others have mentioned, it's a combination of things - you have to have the innate interest (or, if you're unlucky, really overbearing parents who force you to learn it, like Tiger Woods IIRC).
Yeah. I think it's about exposure, though. You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.
> You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.
That is called school, everyone goes there. Before school was mandatory and most kids didn't go there was little opportunity to discover your talents, but today most kids gets to try crafting stuff and reading about a wide range of subjects and doing a wide range of physical sports and learning basic music in school.
There might still be some undiscovered talents after all that, but most do get in contact with something that relates to their talent if they have one.
I'd contend that you can develop interest and talent but struggle to grow without extra exposure. I became interested in computers literally because of Scratch in middle school!
But I wouldn't have progressed without having a parent who was a Java programmer at some point and local libraries with deeply technical books. I had to explore out of class to find my niche and develop my interests.
I would partially agree. Speaking from experience, I can say that if you're naturally good at something, you can learn it pretty well even if resources are of poor quality. Obviously it makes all the difference if they're good, but you get it easily in any case
> [S]ometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are not the things that are [natural] strengths.
Whic implies that most of the time, they are.
And that's a good thing. If it took you years to grasp assembly and C, whereas e.g. asynchronous TypeScript is bequem for you the same way polynomials were bequem for David Hilbert in grade school, you would probably make more money, contribute more to the economy, and be an overall happier person overall working a job that is about 80-90% asynchronous TypeScript, and maybe 10-20% the interesting stuff you don't have natural talent at.
Exceptions exist to this rule but they face a double filter:
1. How are you so sure you know better than the people waving money in your face?
2. Even if you have a good reason, why are you the right person to be doing this? Wouldn't someone else whose strengths and talents already align be better still? Is it really impossible to find them and put them in that position instead?
This seems to place interest and talent as equivalent. The issue is that while I might be talented at TypeScript, I have zero interest in it. I know this because I got paid an unreasonbly high amount of money as an undergrad to write async TypeScript code and do full-stack development.
The conclusion is that I would not be an "overall happier person" from this, even if I could be great at it. Besides, long-term, I would not be great at it, since my lack of interest implies a lack of motivation to succeed at it. And it was a real waste of time when it came to my goals in systems.
Interest plays a big role beyond talent. I would feel more fulfilled being a mediocre dog-killer than an excellent something-else. Either way, interest feels almost equally as important as talent to me. Interest can sometimes make up for what I lack in talent. To succeed at what I want to do, I am more than happy to put in twice the time as someone with natural talent.
Yes, this is so true for me. Especially when I had this revenge arc, where I knew I could be good. Most of my strengths came later. Now people think that I am talented in that stuff, but there's always hard work behind it, and I was mostly the worst in class. But there was always a shining light in sight, where I knew I could, and that it is a good pathway.
>Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent.
It does. Anything you have an interest in, you will spend more time thinking about in general, be more focused while learning the relevant bits, and will breed a willingness to learn something related, but not specific to what you need.
I'm senior technical in my dept and have had a lifelong interest in tech, how it works, why it works, etc. and in my case, my interest definitely influenced my ability to handle work, broad skillset, practical application and more.
especially the example of the indian boy who borrowed and worked through math textbooks of local college students made it pretty clear to me that the difference between him and the poor kids in the US was the inherent drive he seemed to have in this anecdote.
Same as for when the author described feeling to be deserving of praise for the work put in to get a C in math. He would not be satisfied with a C if he had an inherent drive to do math, hell he wouldn’t have gotten that C if he had and if he did he wouldn’t have felt deserving of applause since the work he put in would have felt like playing almost.
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol
"lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"?
i dispute that there exists a singular path that everyone should strive to follow - after all, some people follow their interests and go bankrupt as a result. some people take medication to help cope with the realities of their own capabilities. that's life.
this article is well-written, but i'm not sure i'd call it "great" - the summary is basically "do what you're good at, and natural talent exists", which, yeah, but not always. i take issue mainly with the lack of nuance.
Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money. Some random anime facts YouTube channel can also print money if enough people watch it. Cartoons? Make some Tom and Jerry memes and enjoy. People print money by making videos reacting to stuff, basically professional HN commentators posting hot takes in video form.
Totally absurd if you ask me but that's the reality we live in. Advertising completely fucks up all the incentive systems in society.
Luck is a big factor but still... Rolling the dice does not present much of an opportunity cost. I've seen people make a hobby out of gaming these platforms and algorithms with the most random things imaginable until they found something that sticked. They had nothing, then suddenly they had significant amounts of money. It doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to grab attention for long enough for the advertisers to push their products. It's not like the guy had to go to school for 10 years to do it.
There was an interesting (hearbreaking?) piece about some of the numerous people who have spent years streaming without any viewers[0]. I suppose it is no different from any other novelist/artist/musician who never gains traction, but feels materially different when you have instant feedback that nobody cares about what you are putting into the world.
> Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money
Paying video games alone doesn't print money [0], it's being a great entertainer that does, and it's not easy and usually requires quite a bit of talent and the right personality.
And as others have said, just go into Twitch pick a category and check how many channels are streaming that have 0 viewers... it's staggering, I would argue that perhaps only 2% or so of Twitch channels have more than 1 viewer.
Making bank streaming requires not only grueling work of putting video after video, empty streams, etc. for years but also probably being quite lucky, we only see a tiny fraction of people making content out there.
I agree though that this didn't exist 15 years ago, so it's definitively a possibility when before it wasn't!
[0]: Okay you can be a pro-gamer but I think that's even more niche and harder than making content.
Doesn't seem much more absurd than the multi-billion dollars industry of looking at people pass a ball around through the TV screen. People take issues with the new and take the old for granted. You might as well use your reasoning on every aspects of the entertainment economy.
Advertising does fuck our society in many ways, but I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
> You might as well use your reasoning on every aspects of the entertainment economy.
I do. I find things like professional sports to be extremely problematic due to the disproportional rewards. It's quite demoralizing to watch people get paid millions of dollars to play games while those who get educated and become tradesmen, professionals and whatnot get paid peanuts by comparison.
Ask newer generations what they want to become and too often you get back bullshit like soccer player, streamer, influencer. It's the sort of thing that makes me think society is sick and needs to be completely overhauled.
> I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
I don't think those things should end. I think they should not be incentivized via ad money. Get rid of the advertising and all these distortions will correct themselves. Plenty of people will do it anyway for the love of it and that's okay.
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.
I've known some people with serious artistic talent. Even if they didn't like it. It seems to be inherited. A friend who was a good graphics artist (drawings in Smithsonian) has a son and a daughter. The daughter can draw well, but doesn't use the skill much. The son grew up drawing cars, and now he draws car designs for a major car company. For both of them, it wasn't all that hard.
One unusual skill is the military "coup d'œil". This is the skill of looking at a battlefield and maps, and knowing what to do to win. Some commanders have this, and some don't. Bolger, in his "The Panzer Killers", comments on which WWII generals had it and who didn't. (Bolger is a modern US general who has commanded tank units in combat, so he has experience with this.) This seems to be a skill that does not come from training and experience - either you have it or you don't.
The US Army tries to understand this.[1] This writer claims it is a trainable skill, but the training required is long. You have to fight a lot of battles, real or simulated.
Even then it may just be bringing out the ones who have the innate talent. There aren't that many good generals. Each generation has only a few greats - Giap, Patton, people like that.
It surprised the mother that her kids had artistic talent. She put no effort into teaching them art skills. She wasn't doing it professionally any more, being somewhat burned out by all that fine detail work.
They got into art by themselves.
> In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent.
I don't think this ideas are incompatible, or even unintuitive: most people intuit that it's equally wrong to murder a gas station attendant and a professor of medical ethics, even if the latter is more prestigious and/or talented in some sense than the latter.
(This is a recurrent theme in Scott Alexander's writing: establish a dichotomy and run with it, even if it's facially incorrect.)
This reminds me of Oliver Burkeman's insight in "Meditations for Mortals" that we can only control quantity, not quality. He suggests we focus on what's within our control: showing up consistently and doing the work, rather than obsessing over outcomes. Another piece of his advice is to choose pursuits where you have a natural aptitude. Otherwise, there's too much friction. People enjoy being competent.
Haruki Murakami describes a similar discovery in his memoir "Novelist as a Vocation." He didn't set out knowing he had talent for writing, he discovered it through consistent practice. Only by writing his first novel did he realize he might have aptitude for it. Talent wasn't something he was born knowing about, but something he uncovered through action.
People absolutely can control quality. A simple example is handwriting, I can write chicken scratch or something neater if I slow down. Working longer on many creative pursuits will improve the quality, by experimenting with ideas.
Only up to their quality limit though. This is a slightly different concept to a quantity limit (which also exists), but the general (imperfect) idea is that for your "quality level" (i.e. your ability ceiling), the only real knob you can dial is quantity. In practice, quantity seems to be a defining factor for pushing your ability ceiling higher.
True; and the best case scenario is to discover something that you do have a natural, above average talent/aptitude for and you're interested/obsessive about it as well. This very thing is possibly your biggest leverage in life
If you think differently to people around you, treat their advice with some scepticism. Including the things about work life balance and burn out.
Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.
Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
After reading this note I realized that there is a special breed of people that attends meetings, coordinates communication strategies across the organization, pro-actively addresses blockers and engages stakeholders as naturally as ducks take to water (or as naturally as Ramanujan did math).....
I have always questioned, are the guys making pizza's, working minimum wage jobs wasting their talent or do they simply have no talent? Then I came across this short video : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4HnGbQ-vi8s
The line that stuck with me was how you do something is how you do everything.
I follow an indian mystic named Sadhguru who had the same advice. He said if you do not know yet what to get involved in, then do everything with absolute involvement.
This I think was also the core message of the movie Soul from Pixar.
We all might earn different amounts of money in our lives but all of us have the same ability to create a meaningful life for ourselves.
Palantir is one of the few IT companies out there that out-evil Oracle. Overpriced snake oil for surveillance and assassination, paid with taxpayer money!
I personally find it amusing that a semi-motivational piece about hard work and finding your niche, replete with personable anecdotes, comes from a person who works for a company based in name and function on an evil orb that corrupts everyone who touches it.
If I could measure only two things when hiring but I got an exact measurement of them, they would be initiative/drive and interest.
In my experience, those who are truly interested in something and have an innate need to get things done by taking the initiative themselves almost always beat natural talent.
It just so happens that lots of people with those traits end up looking like people with natural talent.
(tangent) That referenced Scott Alexander article was how I figured out his real last name before the New York Times doxxed him - he gave so many details about his brother I realized who he was talking about.
FWIW, I don't think he wanted to hide his identity. He talked about just not wanting patients to google his full name and find his blog, as opposed to preventing people who read his blog from finding out his name.
its much easier to learn math now. it's good we have chromebooks + various llms for a low price / for free for poor kids. but i guess being poor means you dont have time to learn math or something.
doing math is way easier nowadays though i mean there's discord, stack exchange, various llms that help you, etc.
erdos & ramanujan have amazing mathematica intuition which is kinda the 'heart' of math imho. btw...
Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does.
I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me. They lucked into their lives as well.
I am very grateful for everything I have been given. Even the fact that I exist and get to experience this beautiful thing called consciousness. I do not complain much anymore. I work hard to give back. Not that I am rich. But I am strongly inclined to produce more and consume less, perhaps that is because I wish to show appreciation for the gift of the present that I have been given.
And my reaction isn't positive based on only good luck. I've had my fair share of bad luck, and I have been deeply disadvantaged in certain areas of life. But even for those areas, I do not blame myself. Since I believe that it was 100% the role of luck in shaping everything.
I know some people can react to the lack of free will in a negative way, but that has not been the case for me. Would be interesting to dive deeper into why. This realization has also not taken my agency, or my will to live and take action. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's true.
Paradoxically, we can still make meaningful choices even without free will.
Also the hard deterministic view of the universe gets incomplete at the quantum level, so maybe our brains do have some spark of pure chaos that gives us non-deterministic freedom.
* Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
* No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?
Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.
No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.
In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
Absolutely it's a combination of many factors. However height is undeniably very important. Wemby at 5'5" won't be as impressive a player, no matter how much he trained.
Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)
For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
I love how Schopenhauer can be succint on the nature of writing:
```
There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper.
```
```
As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.
```
Everyone says that, but there are plenty of people who take amphetamines every day, and nearly all of them never approach the productivity of Paul Erdos.
He was just taking adderall-level doses, no recreational doses. Basically in line with ADHD treatment. Not sure how that level for those who need it would be net negative
> But I think it's pretty well understood that taking amphetamines is a net-negative for individuals and society.
Depends on the amphetamine. They are not made equal. It's absolutely possible to maximize benefits and minimize risks. Remember that this stuff treats attention deficit disorder.
Writing as therapy is great, but I doubt he enjoys writing, seems more worried about outcome, about epic and fame. Productivitymania is messing up with our brains…
Yeah and using people who write as inspiration is really weird to me. I’d rather look up to people who are slightly too busy to write 2k words a day because they’re actually doing things.
Why is that weird? The author is obviously impressed by writers, given they have an interesting in writing themselves, so it makes sense to use writers as an example.
And why is writing a less valuable profession than another job? Writing is also "doing a thing" - it just so happens to be a profession for some, a great one for those who are skilled and gifted at it.
Imo the author is missing crucial point, by making comparisons of things which are not comparable. You can not say, Person A is brilliant at xyz, why is Person B not brilliant at it, even though the circumstances and resources might be identical. The difference is, people who push themselves or are pushed to be good or great at something will barely come as far as those people who get drawn to something, because it means the can avoid suffering, grieve or else. Imo this is the strong driving force here, with the examples of Erdös and Ramanujan. I claim Ramanujan didn't became a great mathematician, because he wanted to be good at math, but mathematics gave him a space, where he could forget about his devastating circumstances of poverty and inequality. And the deeper he got into math the more he felt aligned to it and at home.
one can wonder about the biological nature of the talent:
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."
Sounds like Erdős might have had ADD/ADHD or something similar, and amphetamines was his medication.
Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)
Millions of Americans take amphetamines daily, yet very few publish papers. I wager that Erdös simply had talent locked behind a common dopamine disorder.
Eh. It's possible to do well at stuff, without getting high. Just sayin'. I've been doing it for over 40 years. Just takes some self-work.
I think people get hung up on "keeping score." Things like GitHub Activity graphs, where people write scripts, to game theirs, or pumping out mountains of really bad code, in order to jack up their LoC scores.
And, of course, there's money. If you don't generate money for silly rich people, then what you do is worthless.
I think as part of my 2026 goals I’ve got to learn how to shitpost half as good as some of the people that make the HN front page. These blog posts have a solid self-fellating energy to them replete with quotes from brand names that’s just too good to pass up on. A complete lack of experience talking about talent with nothing to show for it? Shit sign me up I’m all about that. I’ll have to put a twist on it. Maybe I’ll find something from Grothendieck and maybe mix it in with Moebius to form that perfect slurry of articulated diarrhea. Hmm, I just have to choose the right serif font that gives my each word an air of Oxford superiority. Maybe I can prompt ChatGPT for tips.
If there's a one word takeaway of the article it's attitude, and I'm curious if someone with as foul a one as yours can compete as well. Let me know if you write something!
There was something squalidly satisfying in your imagery; well done. Somehow the writing style vaguely stirred a memory of the essay "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt.
The author concludes that "I should make sure I sweated blood working on a strength, [and] do more of what comes naturally." Something I found was that sometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are _not_ the things that are strengths. But they have become strengths. Today, I would consider myself to be an OS and systems programmer person. It was abjectly _not_ something that came to me naturally. To understand assembly language, C, and other things, and gain any sort of a proper grasp on, it took years. Sometimes, I tell people how long it took me and how much I struggled, and they are bewildered that I found these subjects so difficult. But I did.
However, my motivating factor was my interest in the subject, not my innate strength in it, and that has pushed me to study it and become strong enough that I can (hopefully, I'm still in college!) succeed in that space.
There are subjects where I could probably succeed if I tried harder and effusively sweated blood (probably pure math related). Pure math is one of those things I just suck at. But the difference is that I don't find it personally interesting, and so the burden of learning and building talent feels infinitely more overwhelming.
Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent. Sometimes I also wonder if my "lack of innate talent" is that actually "I generally learn more slowly." But maybe learning more slowly helps me learn things more deeply as well. Who knows.
* As a side note, the quote I was told is "if you want to be known as a dog killer, you should kill dogs."
Well, the absolutely best-case scenarios is when you both have an innate talent for something and deep interest/obsession about it; I think that the article encourages you to find exactly that and then focus on it, because once you combine innate talent + obsession, you do have unfair advantage over the others
I also think it's not super easy to evaluate whether you have an innate talent for something. The example of Ramanujan reading math textbooks when he was twelve is definitely an exceptional case, but I also think it's not clear to a lot of twelve year olds that such deep resources in a subject even exist. I was lucky that my county's library system had a literal treasure trove of computer science related books that I could check out as a tween and teen, so I was exposed to a subject before most people were.
If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
So sometimes it's hard to quantify whether or not being more successful and growing faster is about the luck of exposure. There are times when I have switched textbooks for learning something or changed my learning style and suddenly catapaulted myself to having the highest scores in classes or understanding a topic infinitely better. People said assembly was easy for them, but maybe spending a year aimlessly typing "si" into GDB was not the most effective way to learn assembly.
But having access to all these resources for exposure allows people to develop their interests and find their talents. It's just hard to say sometimes if that's innate talent and aptitude or just interest and being exposed before everyone else.
> If your parents present you with your first computer when you're five years old, and it drops you to a bash prompt, and that's all you have, then you'll probably know considerably more than everyone else just from that being your only choice for a computing environment.
Only if you have the interest and aptitude to dig in. Compare this with OP's story about trying to learn music instruments at an early age, and his brother. Like others have mentioned, it's a combination of things - you have to have the innate interest (or, if you're unlucky, really overbearing parents who force you to learn it, like Tiger Woods IIRC).
Yeah. I think it's about exposure, though. You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.
> You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.
That is called school, everyone goes there. Before school was mandatory and most kids didn't go there was little opportunity to discover your talents, but today most kids gets to try crafting stuff and reading about a wide range of subjects and doing a wide range of physical sports and learning basic music in school.
There might still be some undiscovered talents after all that, but most do get in contact with something that relates to their talent if they have one.
I'd contend that you can develop interest and talent but struggle to grow without extra exposure. I became interested in computers literally because of Scratch in middle school!
But I wouldn't have progressed without having a parent who was a Java programmer at some point and local libraries with deeply technical books. I had to explore out of class to find my niche and develop my interests.
That really helps, indeed
I would partially agree. Speaking from experience, I can say that if you're naturally good at something, you can learn it pretty well even if resources are of poor quality. Obviously it makes all the difference if they're good, but you get it easily in any case
Soo it's not just about what you're talented at, it's about what you're willing to suffer through
> [S]ometimes the things I have the most passion and interest for are not the things that are [natural] strengths.
Whic implies that most of the time, they are.
And that's a good thing. If it took you years to grasp assembly and C, whereas e.g. asynchronous TypeScript is bequem for you the same way polynomials were bequem for David Hilbert in grade school, you would probably make more money, contribute more to the economy, and be an overall happier person overall working a job that is about 80-90% asynchronous TypeScript, and maybe 10-20% the interesting stuff you don't have natural talent at.
Exceptions exist to this rule but they face a double filter:
1. How are you so sure you know better than the people waving money in your face?
2. Even if you have a good reason, why are you the right person to be doing this? Wouldn't someone else whose strengths and talents already align be better still? Is it really impossible to find them and put them in that position instead?
This seems to place interest and talent as equivalent. The issue is that while I might be talented at TypeScript, I have zero interest in it. I know this because I got paid an unreasonbly high amount of money as an undergrad to write async TypeScript code and do full-stack development.
The conclusion is that I would not be an "overall happier person" from this, even if I could be great at it. Besides, long-term, I would not be great at it, since my lack of interest implies a lack of motivation to succeed at it. And it was a real waste of time when it came to my goals in systems.
Interest plays a big role beyond talent. I would feel more fulfilled being a mediocre dog-killer than an excellent something-else. Either way, interest feels almost equally as important as talent to me. Interest can sometimes make up for what I lack in talent. To succeed at what I want to do, I am more than happy to put in twice the time as someone with natural talent.
Obsession beats all. Being interested or talented help in different ways but obsession is the drive that shines talent.
Yes, this is so true for me. Especially when I had this revenge arc, where I knew I could be good. Most of my strengths came later. Now people think that I am talented in that stuff, but there's always hard work behind it, and I was mostly the worst in class. But there was always a shining light in sight, where I knew I could, and that it is a good pathway.
>Sometimes I wonder if interest influences not just my motivation, but my capacity for learning and talent.
It does. Anything you have an interest in, you will spend more time thinking about in general, be more focused while learning the relevant bits, and will breed a willingness to learn something related, but not specific to what you need.
I'm senior technical in my dept and have had a lifelong interest in tech, how it works, why it works, etc. and in my case, my interest definitely influenced my ability to handle work, broad skillset, practical application and more.
YMMV, but imo, your statement is true.
GL!
True! But it feels like that if you find something that you're both naturaly good at and interested in - you're unstoppable
fwiw i think u hit the nail closer on the head.
especially the example of the indian boy who borrowed and worked through math textbooks of local college students made it pretty clear to me that the difference between him and the poor kids in the US was the inherent drive he seemed to have in this anecdote.
Same as for when the author described feeling to be deserving of praise for the work put in to get a C in math. He would not be satisfied with a C if he had an inherent drive to do math, hell he wouldn’t have gotten that C if he had and if he did he wouldn’t have felt deserving of applause since the work he put in would have felt like playing almost.
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol
"lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"?
i dispute that there exists a singular path that everyone should strive to follow - after all, some people follow their interests and go bankrupt as a result. some people take medication to help cope with the realities of their own capabilities. that's life.
it's isn't just a lenghthy blog post, it's a great article
this article is well-written, but i'm not sure i'd call it "great" - the summary is basically "do what you're good at, and natural talent exists", which, yeah, but not always. i take issue mainly with the lack of nuance.
Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money. Some random anime facts YouTube channel can also print money if enough people watch it. Cartoons? Make some Tom and Jerry memes and enjoy. People print money by making videos reacting to stuff, basically professional HN commentators posting hot takes in video form.
Totally absurd if you ask me but that's the reality we live in. Advertising completely fucks up all the incentive systems in society.
Very, very few of the people who do those things make enough money to earn an income (proportional to how many try).
But the streaming platforms and game developers love that so many people do try.
Luck is a big factor but still... Rolling the dice does not present much of an opportunity cost. I've seen people make a hobby out of gaming these platforms and algorithms with the most random things imaginable until they found something that sticked. They had nothing, then suddenly they had significant amounts of money. It doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to grab attention for long enough for the advertisers to push their products. It's not like the guy had to go to school for 10 years to do it.
To really take a swing at it requires basically full time commitment. It's like starting a small media corporation actually.
There was an interesting (hearbreaking?) piece about some of the numerous people who have spent years streaming without any viewers[0]. I suppose it is no different from any other novelist/artist/musician who never gains traction, but feels materially different when you have instant feedback that nobody cares about what you are putting into the world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17541600
> Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money
Paying video games alone doesn't print money [0], it's being a great entertainer that does, and it's not easy and usually requires quite a bit of talent and the right personality.
And as others have said, just go into Twitch pick a category and check how many channels are streaming that have 0 viewers... it's staggering, I would argue that perhaps only 2% or so of Twitch channels have more than 1 viewer.
Making bank streaming requires not only grueling work of putting video after video, empty streams, etc. for years but also probably being quite lucky, we only see a tiny fraction of people making content out there.
I agree though that this didn't exist 15 years ago, so it's definitively a possibility when before it wasn't!
[0]: Okay you can be a pro-gamer but I think that's even more niche and harder than making content.
Doesn't seem much more absurd than the multi-billion dollars industry of looking at people pass a ball around through the TV screen. People take issues with the new and take the old for granted. You might as well use your reasoning on every aspects of the entertainment economy.
Advertising does fuck our society in many ways, but I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
> You might as well use your reasoning on every aspects of the entertainment economy.
I do. I find things like professional sports to be extremely problematic due to the disproportional rewards. It's quite demoralizing to watch people get paid millions of dollars to play games while those who get educated and become tradesmen, professionals and whatnot get paid peanuts by comparison.
Ask newer generations what they want to become and too often you get back bullshit like soccer player, streamer, influencer. It's the sort of thing that makes me think society is sick and needs to be completely overhauled.
> I don't think its demise would be the end of streaming, or even of "react" content.
I don't think those things should end. I think they should not be incentivized via ad money. Get rid of the advertising and all these distortions will correct themselves. Plenty of people will do it anyway for the love of it and that's okay.
Well then, I agree completely with your viewpoint.
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.
It's like hacking your own reward system
Imo our reward system was originally used how parent comment describes, and it has been hacked by external stakeholders :)
I've known some people with serious artistic talent. Even if they didn't like it. It seems to be inherited. A friend who was a good graphics artist (drawings in Smithsonian) has a son and a daughter. The daughter can draw well, but doesn't use the skill much. The son grew up drawing cars, and now he draws car designs for a major car company. For both of them, it wasn't all that hard.
One unusual skill is the military "coup d'œil". This is the skill of looking at a battlefield and maps, and knowing what to do to win. Some commanders have this, and some don't. Bolger, in his "The Panzer Killers", comments on which WWII generals had it and who didn't. (Bolger is a modern US general who has commanded tank units in combat, so he has experience with this.) This seems to be a skill that does not come from training and experience - either you have it or you don't.
The US Army tries to understand this.[1] This writer claims it is a trainable skill, but the training required is long. You have to fight a lot of battles, real or simulated. Even then it may just be bringing out the ones who have the innate talent. There aren't that many good generals. Each generation has only a few greats - Giap, Patton, people like that.
[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
I wonder how much of it is inheritance, and how much of it is the parent giving their child lots of opportunity to explore their interest with them
It surprised the mother that her kids had artistic talent. She put no effort into teaching them art skills. She wasn't doing it professionally any more, being somewhat burned out by all that fine detail work. They got into art by themselves.
Most likely both :)
"coup d'œil" reminded me of this book, Napoleon's Glance: The Secret of Strategy by William R Duggan
It discusses ideas similar to the ideas in the link you posted.
Yes, Napoleon is said to have had it. Clausewitz describes it, too. It's a well known military concept. Whether it's teachable remains a big question.
> In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent.
I don't think this ideas are incompatible, or even unintuitive: most people intuit that it's equally wrong to murder a gas station attendant and a professor of medical ethics, even if the latter is more prestigious and/or talented in some sense than the latter.
(This is a recurrent theme in Scott Alexander's writing: establish a dichotomy and run with it, even if it's facially incorrect.)
This reminds me of Oliver Burkeman's insight in "Meditations for Mortals" that we can only control quantity, not quality. He suggests we focus on what's within our control: showing up consistently and doing the work, rather than obsessing over outcomes. Another piece of his advice is to choose pursuits where you have a natural aptitude. Otherwise, there's too much friction. People enjoy being competent.
Haruki Murakami describes a similar discovery in his memoir "Novelist as a Vocation." He didn't set out knowing he had talent for writing, he discovered it through consistent practice. Only by writing his first novel did he realize he might have aptitude for it. Talent wasn't something he was born knowing about, but something he uncovered through action.
People absolutely can control quality. A simple example is handwriting, I can write chicken scratch or something neater if I slow down. Working longer on many creative pursuits will improve the quality, by experimenting with ideas.
Only up to their quality limit though. This is a slightly different concept to a quantity limit (which also exists), but the general (imperfect) idea is that for your "quality level" (i.e. your ability ceiling), the only real knob you can dial is quantity. In practice, quantity seems to be a defining factor for pushing your ability ceiling higher.
True; and the best case scenario is to discover something that you do have a natural, above average talent/aptitude for and you're interested/obsessive about it as well. This very thing is possibly your biggest leverage in life
I think it takes the pressure off and, ironically, usually leads to better work over time
If you think differently to people around you, treat their advice with some scepticism. Including the things about work life balance and burn out.
Erdos did _great_. I had no idea he spent decades working for longer than most people spend awake but I know the name. If he'd listened to the advice he was given, we'd have a lot less mathematics and he'd have been less content.
Some other people would have been a little less worried about him. Bad tradeoff.
After reading this note I realized that there is a special breed of people that attends meetings, coordinates communication strategies across the organization, pro-actively addresses blockers and engages stakeholders as naturally as ducks take to water (or as naturally as Ramanujan did math).....
But who wants to be that special breed?
I have always questioned, are the guys making pizza's, working minimum wage jobs wasting their talent or do they simply have no talent? Then I came across this short video : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4HnGbQ-vi8s
The line that stuck with me was how you do something is how you do everything.
I follow an indian mystic named Sadhguru who had the same advice. He said if you do not know yet what to get involved in, then do everything with absolute involvement.
This I think was also the core message of the movie Soul from Pixar.
We all might earn different amounts of money in our lives but all of us have the same ability to create a meaningful life for ourselves.
I'd caution against equating talent with drugs-enhanced mania, especially today when illnesses such as bipolar are on the rise and do shorten lives.
Fair point. OTOH, amphetamines are effective medication for ADHD.
I was impressed by the writer and glad about reading the article until I found out he works for Palantir
Why did where he works have an impact on what he said, for you?
Palantir is one of the few IT companies out there that out-evil Oracle. Overpriced snake oil for surveillance and assassination, paid with taxpayer money!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-12/palantir-...
I personally find it amusing that a semi-motivational piece about hard work and finding your niche, replete with personable anecdotes, comes from a person who works for a company based in name and function on an evil orb that corrupts everyone who touches it.
If I could measure only two things when hiring but I got an exact measurement of them, they would be initiative/drive and interest.
In my experience, those who are truly interested in something and have an innate need to get things done by taking the initiative themselves almost always beat natural talent.
It just so happens that lots of people with those traits end up looking like people with natural talent.
the internet has distorted a lot of things and scale of things.
for a lot of people its possible to become the best plumber in bemdiji. however close to impossible to become the #1 world's tennis player or golfer.
when we play on the internet we are competing globally instead of locally. choose wisely.
(tangent) That referenced Scott Alexander article was how I figured out his real last name before the New York Times doxxed him - he gave so many details about his brother I realized who he was talking about.
FWIW, I don't think he wanted to hide his identity. He talked about just not wanting patients to google his full name and find his blog, as opposed to preventing people who read his blog from finding out his name.
IIRC some of his most famous early posts ran under his own name! This wasn't ever a real secret.
Aw and here I was thinking I was special
https://brucefwebster.com/2008/01/10/the-wetware-crisis-tepe...
Talent, Experience, Professionalism, Education, and Skill.
its much easier to learn math now. it's good we have chromebooks + various llms for a low price / for free for poor kids. but i guess being poor means you dont have time to learn math or something.
doing math is way easier nowadays though i mean there's discord, stack exchange, various llms that help you, etc.
erdos & ramanujan have amazing mathematica intuition which is kinda the 'heart' of math imho. btw...
also https://betterexplained.com - an extraordinary resource for gaining intuition about math
That line about sweating blood on a strength instead of a weakness? I wish I'd learned that a decade earlier...
Everything's luck, or lack thereof.
Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does.
I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me. They lucked into their lives as well.
I am very grateful for everything I have been given. Even the fact that I exist and get to experience this beautiful thing called consciousness. I do not complain much anymore. I work hard to give back. Not that I am rich. But I am strongly inclined to produce more and consume less, perhaps that is because I wish to show appreciation for the gift of the present that I have been given.
And my reaction isn't positive based on only good luck. I've had my fair share of bad luck, and I have been deeply disadvantaged in certain areas of life. But even for those areas, I do not blame myself. Since I believe that it was 100% the role of luck in shaping everything.
I know some people can react to the lack of free will in a negative way, but that has not been the case for me. Would be interesting to dive deeper into why. This realization has also not taken my agency, or my will to live and take action. I know that sounds contradictory, but it's true.
Paradoxically, we can still make meaningful choices even without free will.
Also the hard deterministic view of the universe gets incomplete at the quantum level, so maybe our brains do have some spark of pure chaos that gives us non-deterministic freedom.
Two things:
* Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
* No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?
Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.
No, but being short is completely disqualifying, so being tall is certainly a component of the physical traits that make you good at basketball. If you're 5'2" , it doesn't matter what other gifts you have -- you will not be a pro male basketball player today.
In tennis, being too tall is clearly net bad, but being too short is also definitely bad. 80% of male pro tennis players are 5'10" - 6'4", which is certainly not the statistics of the general population.
Dennis Rodman is a famous counterexample (tall, no particular talent, became an All-Star for rebounding and shot-blocking)
Absolutely it's a combination of many factors. However height is undeniably very important. Wemby at 5'5" won't be as impressive a player, no matter how much he trained.
> Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry.
Is it? Consider the case of nepo babies: often no extreme talent (or perhaps any at all), yet extreme luck.
Winner takes all just means that a few people capture most of the value. That is the case in entertainment. It doesn't say anything about the talent needed to succeed in that industry. What you need to succeed varies depends on the exact industry. Athletes (who are entertainers) have more objective criteria than, say, pop stars. Even in the case of athletes there are factors beyond genetics (e.g. access to coaching.)
For pop stars you need to have some combination of the right look and ability to perform. Ed Sheeran looks a bit like a muppet but seems to be very good at creating catchy songs. Taylor Swift, to me at least, isn't that good at catchy tunes but she has the look and lives the life style. I imagine there are aspects of personality that are not as obvious but very important to survive in the industry.
Entertainment is illustrative. There have been controlled studies (e.g., https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....) showing that there are sort of chaotic social dynamics influencing popularity, in that what others are paying attention to influence what someone is paying attention to, which leads to these kinds of random paths of success. Clearly there's some ability at play as well, but beyond some level, it starts to have a lot of chaotic path dependency.
I suspect a lot of fields are like this also, like academics (nowadays at least) and some other things. Maybe a lot of life is like it.
The discussions often seem to me to become oversimplified, like comparing some poor genius with access to books who overcomes it all by sheer ability, to some hypothetical other person with comparatively great education that's taken for granted. But what if that hypothetical other person is being ridiculed for liking math? Or reading books? Or what if there is no college math books around, they get bored, and go off on the wrong path? What if their interests are for something more complex in its ability determinants than math, or that someone doesn't encounter until later in life usually?
Sometimes I feel like people aren't necessarily exposed to what they are best suited for, for all sorts of reasons. This is a classic "finding a career" problem, with advice to try things until you stumble on it — the converse situation being one where you think you like a vocation and then find out later you hate it. It's not like what you're best suited to is just on a shelf for you to look at and have an immediate grasp of; it comes from having experience with it, which not everyone might have. Maybe there's an excellent potential rugby player out there who never had the opportunity to play rugby or even knows what it is.
Life is just so complex, people get in each others' way for all sorts of reasons, and corruption complicates things more.
I love how Schopenhauer can be succint on the nature of writing:
``` There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. ```
``` As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say. ```
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm
The answer is always amphetamines
Everyone says that, but there are plenty of people who take amphetamines every day, and nearly all of them never approach the productivity of Paul Erdos.
If you think of it as a multiplier, even a small one, then Paul Erdos was just multiplying from a larger starting number.
I stopped reading after there was a quote about how amphetamines helped improve his math.
Like...maybe. But I think it's pretty well understood that taking amphetamines is a net-negative for individuals and society.
He was just taking adderall-level doses, no recreational doses. Basically in line with ADHD treatment. Not sure how that level for those who need it would be net negative
> But I think it's pretty well understood that taking amphetamines is a net-negative for individuals and society.
Depends on the amphetamine. They are not made equal. It's absolutely possible to maximize benefits and minimize risks. Remember that this stuff treats attention deficit disorder.
While reading the article, you found some evidence contradicting a firmly held belief, and decided to keep the belief and discard the new evidence.
I would have stopped reading your comment after realising this, but I was already at the end.
A single anecdote about having ideas while taking amphetamines is hardly evidence.
It's not a large or high-quality piece of evidence, but it is most definitely a nonzero amount of evidence.
The evidence provided by any observational study is no more than the sum of many small pieces of evidence exactly like this one.
obsessively writing Motivational pieces is the new therapy … what a world…
More like an indulging an obsession than therapy; he seems to keenly want to be like the people he is studying.
Writing as therapy is great, but I doubt he enjoys writing, seems more worried about outcome, about epic and fame. Productivitymania is messing up with our brains…
Yeah and using people who write as inspiration is really weird to me. I’d rather look up to people who are slightly too busy to write 2k words a day because they’re actually doing things.
Why is that weird? The author is obviously impressed by writers, given they have an interesting in writing themselves, so it makes sense to use writers as an example.
And why is writing a less valuable profession than another job? Writing is also "doing a thing" - it just so happens to be a profession for some, a great one for those who are skilled and gifted at it.
Imo the author is missing crucial point, by making comparisons of things which are not comparable. You can not say, Person A is brilliant at xyz, why is Person B not brilliant at it, even though the circumstances and resources might be identical. The difference is, people who push themselves or are pushed to be good or great at something will barely come as far as those people who get drawn to something, because it means the can avoid suffering, grieve or else. Imo this is the strong driving force here, with the examples of Erdös and Ramanujan. I claim Ramanujan didn't became a great mathematician, because he wanted to be good at math, but mathematics gave him a space, where he could forget about his devastating circumstances of poverty and inequality. And the deeper he got into math the more he felt aligned to it and at home.
one can wonder about the biological nature of the talent:
"Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it."
Sounds like Erdős might have had ADD/ADHD or something similar, and amphetamines was his medication.
Edit: Never read about Erdős before and came across this: "Erdős published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed". Maybe he was just a functional addict :)
re his prolificacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s_number
Millions of Americans take amphetamines daily, yet very few publish papers. I wager that Erdös simply had talent locked behind a common dopamine disorder.
Jesus Christ, all of these introspections. Stopped reading after 3 lines. Just fucking do it.
Eh. It's possible to do well at stuff, without getting high. Just sayin'. I've been doing it for over 40 years. Just takes some self-work.
I think people get hung up on "keeping score." Things like GitHub Activity graphs, where people write scripts, to game theirs, or pumping out mountains of really bad code, in order to jack up their LoC scores.
And, of course, there's money. If you don't generate money for silly rich people, then what you do is worthless.
I think as part of my 2026 goals I’ve got to learn how to shitpost half as good as some of the people that make the HN front page. These blog posts have a solid self-fellating energy to them replete with quotes from brand names that’s just too good to pass up on. A complete lack of experience talking about talent with nothing to show for it? Shit sign me up I’m all about that. I’ll have to put a twist on it. Maybe I’ll find something from Grothendieck and maybe mix it in with Moebius to form that perfect slurry of articulated diarrhea. Hmm, I just have to choose the right serif font that gives my each word an air of Oxford superiority. Maybe I can prompt ChatGPT for tips.
You should check out the register and lucidity's blog for satirically serious posts.
https://www.theregister.com https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/
You should write a satire blog. I’d read it!
If there's a one word takeaway of the article it's attitude, and I'm curious if someone with as foul a one as yours can compete as well. Let me know if you write something!
There was something squalidly satisfying in your imagery; well done. Somehow the writing style vaguely stirred a memory of the essay "On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt.