
You Don't Need to Be Brilliant to Do Brilliant Work - HNestUnCulte
https://sandymaguire.me/blog/brilliance/
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wsxcde
I enjoyed the article, but I think the author learned the wrong lesson from
his friend's success story. Csongor says:

> Then learning the answer revealed that it's actually something that can be
> fixed --- as is always the case with these things if you think about them
> enough.

The author focuses on the consequent, thinking long and hard about something,
but misses the antecedent, acquiring a deep understanding of a problem area.

I'd say the antecedent is as important as the consequent, if not more
important. If you went to grad school you likely knew tons of brilliant people
who worked long and hard on important and difficult problems and got nowhere.
What they were missing was not some secret effortsauce, but that they picked a
problem on which they didn't have an opening or insight into, so all their
hard work was them spinning their wheels while standing still.

One thing I tell my students now is that they should always pick problems
where they have something everybody else working in the same area doesn't.
Like if you want to do formal verification but your background is years spent
in industry as a kernel developer, you should avoid the temptation to chase
the latest fad (e.g., adversarial machine learning or Spectre/Meltdown), and
instead pick a poorly understood and validated module in the kernel and try to
find out what you can do to make that module more secure.

~~~
zwkrt
Lots of people have one skill, few people have two, and only a tiny fraction
ever put multiple skills to use at once.

~~~
jkuria
So true. This is also the 'Dilbert Theory of Value Creation' that I have used
to great profit. Scott Adams likes to say, he is not the funniest guy around
but funnier than most people. At best, he'd be a mediocre comedian. He can
also draw better than most but hardly a Picasso. And yet, by combining both
skills he has something "rare and valuable" that has led to enormous financial
success.

He also adds that it easier to do this (combining two or more skills) than it
is to be the very best at one thing e.g. an NBA player--it is actually easier,
statistically, to become a billionaire than it is to become an NBA player.

There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA
players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think
about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at
programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating a
rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the
research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett
etc, etc).

Being an NBA player requires one skill at a minimum. Being tall!

~~~
TheTrotters
> There are more than 2,000 billionaires worldwide but only about 480 NBA
> players (32 teams with roughly 15 people on the roster). And if you think
> about it, becoming a billionaire usually involves multiple skills (good at
> programming + business, bill gates. Good at research/analysis + cultivating
> a rare temperament that allows you to act on the insights produced by the
> research even when everyone around you is losing their shirt, Warren Buffett
> etc, etc).

That's not really true. Once you are billionaire you can stay a billionaire
for decades. Meanwhile most NBA players don't have long careers, many stay in
the league only for a few years. I'd expect that over 10-20 years there have
been more NBA players than billionaires.

~~~
jkuria
You have a point but there is also quite a bit of churn in the billionaire
ranks. So if you include all that have been billionaires in the last 10 - 20
years you'll have many more than just 2,000. And for practical purposes,
having $500 million vs. $1 billion is really the same league of wealth. So if
we make the criterion $500 million my point is absolutely true! 5,000 at any
given time vs 480.

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gpsx
A friend recounted a conversation where he was talking to one of his friends,
saying he couldn't understand how these people could be so dumb. (I don't
recall what "these" refers to...) His friend said, "I don't think it's that
they're dumb. They just aren't curious." That was an enlightened comment. I
think that is one of the elements that is needed to do brilliant things, just
as Csonger says he was interested in understanding why this was "not
possible".

~~~
zxcmx
Not even “not curious”, but often just “not curious about that thing, right
now”.

Heck, most people understand very little about the myriad of everyday systems
that keep them alive. Forget engines, computers or say, type theory. Most
literally don’t know where their water comes from (to any level deeper than
“it comes in a pipe”) or where their poo goes - and collectively that’s ok
because the benefit of society is that this stuff gets taken care of for us.

I think looking up now and then, scratching the surface of our own ignorance,
can help specialists build empathy when communicating with others outside
their field.

~~~
mrkstu
There is a cost to curiosity. Lack of focus. I had a real challenge in my
career- I continuously ranged far afield in learning well beyond the direct
subject areas of my network engineering career.

That often took away time I 'should' have spent directly researching problem
areas applicable to my day job. It finally led me to separating with a company
I had been with for 8 years and had a lot of close relationships with.

But what it did was put me on a path to actually use that store of knowledge.
Now I'm a Network/Enterprise Architect and a key cog for my current CTO. I
wasn't being used optimally previously but I also didn't make sure I was in
the correct position that those skills/tendencies could be recognized and not
be a hindrance. So much in life is in the framing of things- control that
story, and your success is much more likely.

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hprotagonist
_Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the
sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important:
the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of
‘meaningless’ detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and
meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait
can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will
swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents
of thick reference manuals into their brains. [During the production of the
first book version of this document, for example, I learned most of the rather
complex typesetting language TeX over about four working days, mainly by
inhaling Knuth 's 477-page manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this
genuinely surprised me, because years of associating with hackers have
conditioned me to consider such performances routine and to be expected.
—ESR]_

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html)

~~~
rl1987
How can one learn or acquire this trait?

~~~
hprotagonist
just start drinking from the firehose.

the trick is to convince yourself not to care about the immediate utility of
what you’re learning. And store pointers to data, it’s lighter weight.

~~~
owyn
agree. read a lot. especially other people's source code.

~~~
hprotagonist
read a lot, and i'd say read more or less any and all competent texts you can
find.

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Abishek_Muthian
I think brilliant, not-brilliant, idiot or any other judgemental terms spent
on tagging someone or ourselves is just a waste of time.

The greater the effort spent on something by someone, greater is the
probability of a favourable outcome to them. But it is still a probability and
not a certainty because of variables involved.

~~~
EForEndeavour
As long as people work to live, there will be a pressing demand for such
labels, flawed though they may be. Top organizations will always want to hire
the smartest/most brilliant/non-idiotic people they can afford, for various
practical definitions of these terms.

If two people seem similar in every way, but Person 1 has demonstrated that
they achieve greater probability of success compared to Person 2 given
comparable time investments, then you'd probably want to hire Person 1. Real
life is never this cut and dried, but the principle holds.

~~~
Abishek_Muthian
I largely agree and work is a test environment, like any other test e.g. SAT;
one who performs better is rewarded.

But there's plenty of occasions where judgements is a waste of time, like at
the personal level expressed in the OP article. OP does agree that the
activity is result from the ego, I don't think he/she did enough to explore
the ego resulting in injustice to the colleague as whole in the article.

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teddyh
More or less the same point which Richard Hamming makes in his talk _You and
Your Research_ :

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw&list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30&index=31#t=14s)

Except, of course, that Hamming gives a few more practical pointers.

~~~
teddyh
Slightly better video and sound (from the same source material):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR89bl7hTOS3F3wuoGj7id3Xy&index=32#t=22s)

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nullwasamistake
This goes along with a study I read a while back that you can do practically
any job with an IQ of 120. Higher than average, but not anywhere close to
genius level. With an average IQ of 100 you can still preform well in
something like 80% of jobs.

Software engineers have an average IQ of 110ish so most HN readers are capable
of doing almost any job. It's really about effort and things that are harder
to measure like creativity

~~~
saagarjha
> Software engineers have an average IQ of 110ish so most HN readers are
> capable of doing almost any job.

Do you have a source for this?

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mjcohen
Something I read many years ago:

There are two way to get a Ph.D. - find a problem and solve it or find a
solution method and come up with a problem that the method solves.

The second way is by far the easier.

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neural_thing
Depends on what you count as "brilliant work". All of the Neuroscience PhDs at
Stanford, UCSF and MIT (non-exhaustive list, just examples) I've met are at
least 2 standard deviations away from average intelligence and many are 3 SDs
away. Makes me think that some brilliant work requires being brilliant.

~~~
dTal
Bit of a sampling bias. "Neuroscience PhD at MIT" is a helluva qualifier.

~~~
stingraycharles
I guess this highlights the problem, that “brilliance” is in fact subjective
and relative. To some “brilliance” is a PhD at MIT, to others it is being able
to do something much more mundane.

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akhilcacharya
This was a good article, but I'm skeptical if someone from UWaterloo can
attest to being "Normal". People that came from Waterloo are pretty
exceptional on average unlike normal people like me.

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suff
Really good read. So true that most 'innovation' is really a lot of tedious
work most people don't bother doing. That is in sharp contrast to the
'Eurika!' moment that most people think of. There may never be a eurika
moment, just a bunch of small insights put together into a body of work.

~~~
bumby
I think it was Issac Asimov's quote that the most exciting phrase in science
is not "Eureka!" but "Hmmm... that's funny..."

Meaning, many innovations are the result of unexpected outcomes rather than a
brilliant mind setting out to prove a specific result

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kissgyorgy
Not sure about that. Brilliant work is by definition brilliant. :D Although
you can do pretty great things and even be very famous or very rich even if
you are not smart.

