
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius - pilingual
http://paulgraham.com/genius.html
======
klik99
Before I read the article, I thought the “bus ticket” was referencing William
Sidis, who in the early 20th century gave a mathematics lecture at MIT at 10,
a Harvard student at 11, was expected to revolutionize math but then dropped
out of the public eye to write strange books, one being an etymology of train
and bus tickets across the US, collecting several thousand unique stubs. I bet
that you could learn a lot about the flow of ideas and culture in the US from
such a strange artifact, and while I agree with much of what PG says here, his
definition of utility leans towards the economic sense. Also of note, Knuth
has a section on his website devoted to photos of traffic signs!

~~~
grappler
I knew I'd heard recently about someone brilliant who had obsessed over bus
tickets. Thanks for helping me recall it.

A recent episode of Radiolab, dated August 27, 2019, introduced a large
audience (including me) to another podcast, The Memory Palace:

[https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/memor...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/memory-
palace)

With that strong endorsement I began going through the whole back-catalog of
The Memory Palace, and Episode 36, dated January 7, 2011, “six scenes from the
life of william james sidis, wonderful boy”, talks about Sidis' obsession with
bus tickets. Or maybe more precisely, streetcar transfers.

[http://thememorypalace.us/2011/01/six-scenes-in-the-life-
of-...](http://thememorypalace.us/2011/01/six-scenes-in-the-life-of-william-
james-sidis-wonderful-boy/)

I think it said he figured out ways to traverse great distances on a single
fare by connecting transfers. That kind of graph traversal thinking strikes me
as ahead of its time for the age of streetcars, and could plausibly have led
to some interesting places.

~~~
klik99
I've been fascinated by Sidis in the past, yet never really got his transfer
ticket fascination. Maybe because I've been steeped in graph theory for the
last couple of years but listening to that episode made me realize the beauty
of what he saw.

If this written/possible (is it?) today, no doubt we'd have web pages and
youtube channels devoted to "Transfer Surfing".

And I've got a new podcast to listen to!

------
throwaway713
I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I
think _most_ people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all. And
as someone who has obsessive interests in a lot of things (some “useful”, some
not), that seems really odd to me: how can you just be satisfied to go to
work, come home, watch TV, and go to bed each day? (Not saying that’s the
wrong way to live, just saying it is surprising to someone who isn’t that
way). But I guess the obsessive ones are really the weird ones in society, in
terms of the fraction of the population they constitute.

My problem lately has been acquiring enough free time to be obsessive. I
really miss the days of playing piano for 12 hours straight or tinkering
around with reverse engineering the OS of some MP3 player. And my wife is
pregnant for the first time, so like PG mentions, I wonder (but suspect) how
that is going to change things. I have a very intense dread of losing myself
in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than
ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings,
making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all,
but I have to do them because they need to be done.

~~~
danbmil99
Frankly most people obsess about things like finding a mate, playing video
games, collecting comics, politics, reading books, watching & discussing TV
shows & movies, social websites (such as this one), sex, porn, fashion,
sports, the social politics of work (as opposed to the work itself -- e.g.
"The Office") and, of course, their kids. But none of these sorts of
obsessions are likely to lead to fame or fortune.

I think it is the rare person who literally has no obsessive interests at all.
Sounds rather sad and boring.

~~~
sornaensis
Interests aren't necessarily obsessions or passions.

I think it's rare to be obsessed with any of those things, but common to be
superficially interested. For instance many people will just watch a TV show
and enjoy it, and maybe even rewatch it a few times, without knowing all of
the actors or writers or how the production of the show worked, etc etc, while
you would expect an obsessed person to know at least some of these things,
because they are compelled to find out at much as they possibly can about the
object of their obsession.

~~~
chubot
Yeah that’s a good point. Almost everyone watches TV. But people like say
Jimmy Kimmel watched TV so closely that they came to understand its underlying
mechanisms.

What makes people laugh? What entertains them and makes them less lonely? Who
are the important people in the business? You could watch TV for years and
never ask yourself those questions.

After all there’s no real school for TV. Many people on TV now studied it by
simply paying closer attention. There are LA insiders for sure who can watch
their parents, but there are also people like Letterman who was from a small
town in Indiana.

As another example, a lot of UFC fighters also grew up watching the nascent
sport in the 90’s. They learned how it worked simply by paying more attention,
practicing, and being more obsessive about it than the millions of other fans.
There’s no school for it since it was a rapidly developing martial art.
YouTube has apparently permanently changed the state of practice in Jiu-Jitsu.

------
tompccs
I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which
minimise the number of geniuses entering each field.

In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and
certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like
becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far
better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that
wouldn't have been the case.

The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists -
people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this
might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because
people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than
splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer
enjoyment of it.

~~~
jakobmi
The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand.
Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because
it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and
physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it,
you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in
mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric
company.

Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to
understand. With lots of proofs and examples.

I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the
"make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier

~~~
jacquesm
That's one very interesting observation. I've commented in that vein a short
while ago where I noticed that once I finally understood what some paper was
about my usual response (definitely not always) would be 'That's it?'.

Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles
without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to
hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.

~~~
saagarjha
Wikipedia for certain topic is often just as inscrutable as papers would be. I
have no idea why this is, but my guess is that it’s written by people with
passing interest in the field who lack the experience to effectively distill
their knowledge like paper authors might.

------
NPMaxwell
You may think there is some rational choice to be made about obsessive
curiosity. Maybe not. In 1960, my mom lived near a six year old who could fix
electric stuff. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him and brought him things
to fix. TV's were no problem; dead radios were great; telephones were cool. He
was a super happy kid with a constant enthusiasm and a sparkle in his eye,
running home from school every day to see what he could learn and what
neighbors had brought for his help. He had thrown circuit breakers in the
house many times. One day, there was a blackout and he came down from his room
to apologize to this parents, again. They had an idea and they pointed out the
window. "Well you really did it this time. Look, the entire city went down."
And that was it. He stopped with electronics. At first he was morose and
anxious, but his parents figured he would get used to his new life. He left
for college the same disconnected and subdued kid he became at six. My mom
bumped into him again around 1990, when he was about 35, and he never did
recover: still sad, puffy, disconnected from people, uninspired, hating his
job, unhappy with friends.

~~~
mantap
I thought this story was going to end with "and that kid was Richard Feynman"

~~~
NPMaxwell
That's a great contrast. Yes, Feynman had a thriving business fixing
electronics as a kid. Difference: his parents didn't worry that he was going
to grow up weird. They were happy with what might have become his bus ticket
collecting

------
drongoking
Two reactions to this. I almost believe these:

1\. The difference between collecting bus tickets, working on mathematics, and
figuring the crystallization patterns of snowflakes is virtually nothing. To
the people obsessed with it, it is all-important; to outsiders, all three look
indistinguishably pointless. Only in retrospect can anyone say whether the
activity led to something society considers important. The truly obsessed
don't care.

2\. Genius is overrated. We like stories of great individuals changing the
world with their genius because we like stories and we dislike chance. But for
nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were
working on it at the same time. Civilization's progress is more a sequence of
ideas whose time had come, but we prefer stories of great unique geniuses.

~~~
pntnp
> 2\. Genius is overrated.

What?

> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people
> were working on it at the same time.

Not just "people" \- "geniuses". History shows multiple geniuses were working
on it at the same time.

I do agree that we give too much credit to a single genius. Had Isaac Newton
not lived, we'd still have calculus, physics, etc in some form or another. The
same thing with Einstein, Turing, etc. But that doesn't mean genius is
overrated. What's overrated is the hero worshiping narrative we build around a
single genius due to racial or nationalistic reasons.

But I think we should have as many geniuses working on problems as possible
rather than saying that genius is overrated.

~~~
archagon
Were all great discoveries and works made by “geniuses”? Or do we assign them
the title in retrospect?

------
sgentle
Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of
the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-
prize-pool juggernaut.

The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played
this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really
pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend.
Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I
know it was all worth it."

And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any
rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that
competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would
be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just
table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a
decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million
dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.

It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become
a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not
now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a
million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.

Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a
combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable
interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system
designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we
may never see such inefficiency again.

~~~
Alex3917
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this.

Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in
a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as
everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything
meaningful in life.

Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and
developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.

~~~
panarky
The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal
advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested"
because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which
you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word).

Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is
incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old
bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be
famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to
win.

So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess
whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a
thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really
disinterested.

As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal
advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the
magical property of disinterest that pg describes.

Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress,
but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of
progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.

~~~
Alex3917
> I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it
> sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're
> disinterested.

It's interest in the sense of "conflict of interest", not in the sense of
finding something fascinating.

~~~
sah2ed
Perhaps a word that connotes neutrality like “impartial” would be better in
this context?

~~~
CamperBob2
I'd almost say "introversion" or "selfishness" is the right term, if the
latter weren't so prejudicial. You aren't collecting bus tickets or obsessing
over infinite series to advance your own material interests or standing in the
external world.

"Disinterest" doesn't work at all in any sense of the term. In the absence of
overt mental illness, the bus-ticket collector must see it as being in his
best interest to spend his time collecting bus tickets, or he'd do something
else instead. ("You are your calendar.") The search for gratification, however
externally meaningless, is certainly a valid expression of self-interest.

Put another way, if you would object if you were forcibly stopped from
pursuing a goal, then you cannot be described as "disinterested."

------
INGELRII
Side note about Newton and occult.

Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into
physics.

Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that
movements were caused by physical contact.

Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that
transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with
occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for
his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because
that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first,
because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common
sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.

Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as
Einstein did.

~~~
ken
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read
that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't
know what he actually _did_.

Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model
which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What
exactly were his inputs and outputs?

In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and
experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I
hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years
after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through
experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was
relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?

~~~
ajkjk
Einstein's inputs were a bunch of scattered theories about electromagnetism
and thermodynamics -- particularly, Maxwell's equations for the
electromagnetic field, and the empirical description of the photoelectric
effect, and Planck's description of blackbody radiation.

His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena:
that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that
is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being
transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and
blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.

This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up
with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for
which existing explanations were far too complex.

The amazing part is that he did this four times in one year (1905):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers)

------
DanBC
I love that he chose bus tickets, because I used to collect UK bus tickets. I
started because I used to repair bus ticket machines (made by Almex Control
Systems ltd) in the early 1990s.

I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how
Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it
out.
[https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c...](https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)
If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several
ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're
interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small
points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name
today:
[https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...](https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link)

Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport
enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).

Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this
obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive
interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.

I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be
learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural
ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive
interests".

I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are
obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I
only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and
ticket machines is unusual.

------
QueensGambit
Having done passion projects for 15 years, the elephant in the room is: Do you
have dependents and do they support you? At some point in time, your worthless
obsession will feel like selfishness to your dependents and yourself. Its a
material world after all. This is a great article, but a reality check will be
helpful!

~~~
graeme
He talked about children in the article. And also, work that matters generally
doesn’t leave a genius starving: it’s the difference between obsessive
interest into things that matter and bus ticket collecting.

You could of course be at the point where you started too late and you haven’t
time to ramp up useful work into successful outcomes through obsessiveness, as
you already have dependents. Or you could be in the unlucky edge he talks
about of people who only went down the wrong paths due to risks turning out
wrong.

But I believe the article did address all of your points.

~~~
PeterisP
Obsession with work that matters won't leave you starving, but it will leave
you starved for time; anything that's a priority will draw away time and
attention from other priorities e.g. relationships and family.

------
dasil003
I like the thesis, but peeling the onion back, there's an implicit assumption
that one is always optimizing for world-changing impact. Looking back at
Newton and sorting his work into useful/worthless buckets after a few hundred
years tells us nothing about how he actually valued these pursuits, and what
motivated him at the time. As silicon valley culture goes mainstream, salaries
at big tech soar, and increasing numbers of young people buy into the value of
creating "impact", the irony is that it pushes more young talent towards local
maxima instead of truly novel pursuits that might could lead to world-changing
innovation. IMHO the only way out of this conundrum is actually to be okay
with not making world-changing innovation and directly embrace the creative
process of ones pursuits.

~~~
knzhou
I thought the point of the essay is that the obsessed will be obsessed, with
possibly great results, regardless of whatever the lucrative career path of
the moment is. It's not about anybody "optimizing" anything.

~~~
eVoLInTHRo
The first half of the essay aligns with your takeaway. But the second half
does start to delve into how to identify useful obsessions, starting with "But
there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be
one that matters." Which sounds like an optimization, and which seems at least
somewhat at odds with a major starting premise that you mentioned ("They're
not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own
sake.").

I agree with OP, the thesis makes sense assuming the primary goal of one's
life is discovering world-changing ideas (what he's calling "genius"). That's
understandable from a VC perspective since that's basically what VCs do. But
most of us here aren't VCs, and while idea discovery is a great goal to have
even if you're not a VC, it doesn't have to be the primary one.

------
Aardappel
This made me realize how harmful the focus on "impact" at BigCo's is. You got
all these decently talented people, who all can see a variety of paths of how
they can help the company, some which uniquely use that persons obsessions,
but instead we're asked to cut all those paths short in favor of the one which
_ahead of time_ we think will make numbers go up the most for BigCo's core
business. No wonder we end up with all these half-assed me-too products.

But yeah, thanks Paul for giving me an excuse to keep noodling with
programming language design and implementation. I'm sure there's genius to be
found in there one day ;)

------
tomxor
> When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage them to
> go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep. I don't do this because of
> the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want them to feel the joy of
> learning, and they're never going to feel that about something I'm making
> them learn. It has to be something they're interested in. I'm just following
> the path of least resistance; depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show
> them the joy of learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the
> better.

I feel like this part captures the essence of it... to be _really_ good at
something, you have to have deep interest which you can't force - so just
forget about being good, it's not worth worrying about, instead discover what
you can have fun with and get crazy about. This feels like such a natural
thing to encourage in kids :)

Also the side effects of getting deeply interested in random things should not
be underestimated, in my experience the connections between seemingly
disconnected things are unexpectedly common.

------
ArtWomb
"The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People
are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary
to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when
the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go
forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or
maybe it doesn't, and you lose" -Woody Allen, Match Point (2005)

I had one of those rare moments recently where I actually had an encounter
with someone I considered to be an honest-to-God Genius. I won't go into the
specifics. But it was at a public lecture. Elite research university.
Auditorium packed with scientists of "Breakthrough" and "Nobel" calibre. And
we were all "wow'ed"!

Afterwards I got to chat a bit with the relatively young researcher who gave
the lecture. And I asked her point blank how she knew to follow path X when
everyone else was following Y?

And she admitted it was sheer dumb luck! They had run out of the exotic
material in the lab, and so she had to use its more common predecessor.
Furthermore, all the elements had aligned to produce that infinitesimally
improbable atomistic level perturbation at that very moment that led to her
insights. Luck compounded upon luck.

And at that moment, it was much like PG described. Obsession, coupled with
absolute conviction. She could not let go of The Idea. What's most interesting
is that this finding occurred mid-200s. And it was only now a decade and a
half later, that the world was beginning to realize its fruits ;)

~~~
ralfd
... something about battery tech?

------
DJHenk
> Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no
> point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested. They're not doing it
> to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.

I don't agree with this. They might very well do it to impress others. Most of
all, they do it to impress each other. Go to any specialized forum of
subreddit and you will find members arguing over details in order to gain
respect. If I say X, you say Y and in the end X 'wins', I have gained some
status. Bus ticket collectors are people, just like us, and need validation
from their peers.

~~~
spydum
I think there is room for three types of folks along this dimension. Yes, some
people enjoy the validation, but there are plenty of obsessive folks who
simply don't care for the validation. They take delight in the subject matter
independent of peers.

~~~
usrusr
Definitely a lot of peer validation in niche obsession. But the single person
niche exists as well (and people in a bigger niche, but isolated), and there
the only person to impress is oneself. A bigger the niche means that chances
to stumble upon something still undiscovered are lower, so peer validation is
irrelevant or maybe even a negative signal for obsessions that might turn into
genious.

------
skybrian
This essay has a very individualist underlying assumption that one person has
to do it all. Maybe that's not true? Could a community of hobbyists who share
the same obsession make progress?

If a lot of the effort comes from going down blind alleys until you hit on
something, it seems like the work could be pretty easily distributed?

~~~
analog31
I believe the answer is yes. I'm thinking about the Homebrew Computer Club,
the framers of the Constitution, and the musicians who developed modern jazz.
It sounds odd, but the Constitution was written by a bunch of rich guys who
happened to share a passion for learning about history and politics. When one
of their kids got in trouble, the only advice they could come up with was to
read yet another old book in Latin.

Jazz was commercially viable for a time, maybe into the 1950s, but then the
musicians had to adopt a model of playing boring commercial music, and
teaching music to kids for a living, while pushing the boundaries of jazz in
living rooms and academic music departments.

------
_Microft
What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone?

For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though
I am a physicist by training.

~~~
ssivark
Fellow physicist-by-training. Got interested in "machine learning" and
"artificial intelligence" a few years ago. As I delve into the roots of the
field, I increasingly feel that many interesting ideas seem to have been
discarded without justification other than the field switching en masse to a
different fad at some instant.

Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see
anyone else being interested in them right now. I think there might be
interesting insights into both biological and artificial intelligence (with
communication definitely being an important component; consciousness is a word
I avoid till I can find a more concrete handle on it), but it's primarily
based on interest/taste, rather than motivated goal chasing :-)

(I'm more interested in concrete ideas from Wiener, Ashcroft, etc. rather than
the fluff that came later as the word's usage got stretched beyond meaning, as
is now happening with "AI")

~~~
carapace
In re: cybernetics and psychology, Gregory Bateson said that the
Neurolinguistic Programming folks achieved what he had been working towards, a
cybernetic psychology. If you're interested, start with the very first books
"Structure of Magic" vol I and II
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964154.The_Structure_of_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/964154.The_Structure_of_Magic_I)
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821993.The_Structure_of_...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821993.The_Structure_of_Magic_II)

Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational
Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated
algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.

Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but
please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the
bathwater.

\- - - -

In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e.
what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in
fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor
"seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the
domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?

I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems
using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the
HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video:
[https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth](https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth)

He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got
the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.

------
SubuSS
Paul seems to write about obsession as something that can be cultivated. In my
personal experience, this has been either a personality trait or extreme focus
and hard work because of some expected reward. For me this article feels more
like a motivational speech rather than an actual theory.

Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also
one of those things anyone can do if only...?

~~~
CarVac
I think a tendency to become obsessed is simply a personality trait. Some
people just aren't that way.

Depression, for example, can sap the motivation to do anything.

~~~
Jamwinner
Depression can also lead to a singlar focus. I am pretty sure I have finished
a few projects out of despair I would have never otherwise. Perhaps at the
expense of other more 'practical' ones, but I have come to value them more.

------
jamesrcole
> _there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might
> be one that matters. For example, it 's more promising if you're creating
> something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates. It's
> more promising if something you're interested in is difficult, especially if
> it's more difficult for other people than it is for you. And the obsessions
> of talented people are more likely to be promising. When talented people
> become interested in random things, they're not truly random._

You can be very rigorous in trying to understand some topic, such that you
won’t be satisfied until you understand it from first principles. Since so few
people do this, it can lead to new discoveries.

------
dr_dshiv
If anyone wants a beautiful obsession that requires only kindle books and
internet searches, allow me to suggest Western Esotericism. It's not what you
think.

Try to reconstruct the role of Pythagoras on modern society-- and then realize
that the first attested hypothesis-driven scientific research question still
hasn't been answered.

Start with "Western Esotericism: a guide for the perplexed" or the incredible
Shwep.net, the "secret history of Western Esotericism podcast".

~~~
theNJR
Thanks for the podcast and book suggestion. Diving in now.

------
mojuba
Just to point out, we not only _find_ stuff where our obsession lies, we can
sometimes create complexity and interesting stuff where it lies, out of the
thin air.

I'm obsessed about audio/music tech. Some part of this area is immensely
complex due to people's obsession with good sound, or new interesting sounds,
or new ways of altering it. They don't discover these things, they create it.
Time stretch or pitch shift algorithms, for example, were created (I suppose)
by obsessed people who like to create complexity and by extension, useful
stuff.

So no, Darwin's invention model is not the only possible one.

I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus
tickets, but who knows, maybe some key to inventing more efficient public
transport lies there. Or at least more efficient bus ticket printing. Can be
anything!

~~~
DanBC
> I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus
> tickets,

Some people have an obsession for the actual tickets, while others have an
obsession with the ticketing pricing system. These people can find useful
oddities with the system. In some parts of the UK it's worthwhile buying a
year long railcard for two stations that you will never travel to or from,
because that gives you a gold card, and the gold card gives you 1/3 off other
tickets.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrFze0XH5M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrFze0XH5M)

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying if you want to test systems you
want a legitimate way for these people to look at it, because otherwise they
may find ways that are problematic.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum)

But also, the essay does say that some obsessions are useful and others don't
appear to have wider uses than being interesting for that individual person.

~~~
mojuba
True, but my point was that it seems like usefulness can be created out of the
think air, i.e. you don't discover it (or miss it) but instead you direct your
obsession towards usefulness by adding complexity. I think maths is a great
example of this, though some big part of it hasn't proved its usefulness yet.

------
maxander
Academia, for all its faults, is still an excellent system for collecting
those who are obsessive about s subject (at least for a certain set of
“established” subjects.) It’s preposterously difficult to do the PhD-through-
tenure course if you’re not obsessed, and it certainly isn’t the financially
optimal career path; if someone has made it through that system, you can be
sure they’re happy sitting and doing their subject all day, for days.

~~~
Gatsky
Not really, it depends in the field. I have definitely met academics that
after an early success just keep going. The extent to which they work in one
area relates more to their initial success than any obsession. Similarly well
established academics that quit to do something similar to their research but
not very related and much better paid.

------
asdfasdf45
When someone in a sports psychology session broke down motivation into
internal vs external [1], they changed the way I would approach anything I do
from then onwards. Literally changed my life in 20mins.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Incentive_theories:...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Incentive_theories:_intrinsic_and_extrinsic_motivation)

------
davesque
There are two other ingredients to genius that are even less often discussed:

1\. Opportunity

2\. A sense that pursuing opportunities is important

Some never find good opportunities to learn and never improve. Some are
surrounded by good opportunities to learn but never recognize them or don't
think they're important to pursue. Being in an environment with good
opportunities and having the impulse to pursue them has _a lot_ to do with
your personal background and upbringing. Surely counterexamples can be found,
but I think they're in the minority. Until society comes to terms with this,
it will continue to waste most of its intellectual talent.

------
lordnacho
This is very close to some of my own observations about talent.

Whenever I've had the info to compare, I tend to find a different degree of
skill among coders who started as teens compared to those who came to it
later. I put it down to interest. Obsessive teens end up spending huge amounts
of time learning things. Teenagers know very little about what makes money, at
least when I was a kid. The cat may well be out of the bag about tech jobs now
though, YMMV. I'll address it further down in the part about professionals.

The same goes for sporting talent, except there you seem to have to make
decisions that are against financial sense. Here's two anecdotes.

A very famous F1 driver went to school with a friend of mine. He got booted
from the school for not showing up, preferring to practice driving. This is
before he got famous, so you can imagine how foolish that might have seemed if
he hadn't eventually gotten a seat. OTOH he might never have become world
champion without pouring a crazy amount of time into it.

I recently discovered that a very famous footballer would cross the water to
my neighborhood and play with the kids there. I'm not sure he was even allowed
to by the club that had signed him, but he'd already conquered his home town
and decided there were more interesting games nearby in the larger city. He
evidently thought nothing of it, enjoying himself greatly practicing the skill
moves that he's become famous for.

On a related note, the disinterested interest thing is why I've never met a
talented professional. By that, I mean the classic suit-and-tie professionals.
Lawyers, doctors, accountants, bankers. I've met plenty of competent ones, but
never that special one who seems to be especially knowledgeable or passionate.
My guess is that very few kids choose these interests without the motivation
provided from a steady salary and high social status. These are also the
professions that people talk about retiring from as if it were a given that
nobody would hang around if they didn't have to. Particularly among bankers,
you often talk about your "number", which is the amount of money that would
make you quit and do something you actually like. It's not that people in
other professions don't ever retire, but you can imagine a retired carpenter
making chairs for himself. I don't think of retired accountants doing taxes
for fun.

With software these days you get both. Kids who were going to learn coding
even if it meant having no food, along with people who just want a good income
doing something leaning towards a slight interest of theirs. Granted, that
slight interest may well grow into something much deeper, and software is
unique in the way it allows this.

~~~
csa
> On a related note, the disinterested interest thing is why I've never met a
> talented professional. By that, I mean the classic suit-and-tie
> professionals. Lawyers, doctors, accountants,...

I think your comment is directionally correct if you look at the bulk of
practitioners, but I wonder if you’ve looked in the right places for the
exceptions.

As one example, some of the best legal thinkers I have met were in law
schools. That said, I’ve also met some “practicing” lawyers who had that
passion — at retirement age, they are often the sages that people make
pilgrimages to see (my friend’s father was one of these for estate law).

There are also professionals who pursue their compulsory continuing education
aggressively. For doctors, this is actually a litmus test I use when I am
looking for a new one (usu. due to moving). I had a dentist who, after
establishing his practice, went back to school to get his MD so that he could
work on the more interesting problems of oral surgery. He then joined the Army
reserves as a doctor/dentist to help the Army with some of the unique medical
problems they have (iirc, it was mostly oral surgery).

> ... bankers

You may be right here.

That said, if you expand “banker” to “financier” or something like that, you
can probably find some. Buffet and Munger come to mind. John Mauldin as a
writer on economics/finance also comes to mind as a lesser-known personality.
There seems to be a potentially long list.

> I don't think of retired accountants doing taxes for fun.

Although rare, they exist. I have a retired family member who is one of them.

------
lolc
What I find useful about going deep is not usually what I find at the bottom.
It's the tools that I employed on the way that prove useful later. And that's
not only if I'm the first to invent them! Even if they are a well-known
pattern: I have now experienced them in ways that instruction cannot provide.

------
choxi
I think your social life or lack of has a large influence on the things you
become obsessed about. A lot of friends and people in general are not going to
be supportive of your eccentric interests, in the worst case they might judge
you poorly for it but in the best case they don’t mind but don’t find it
interesting either. It might be great for your startup ambitions to have a lot
of eccentric obsessions, but it’s also socially isolating. I think there’s a
reason why a lot of geniuses were also social outcasts.

------
TheOtherHobbes
This sounds like a retread of Gladwell's 10,000 hours. Instead of putting the
hours in, put in obsession instead. Whether by accident or design, I can
imagine it being a flattering message on HN for regulars and for startup
founders.

It's wrong. No amount of hours or obsession compensates for lack of raw
talent.

Innate ability sets a talent ceiling. Hard work/time/obsession refine and
manifest raw talent where it's there, but can't compensate when it isn't. (And
a bad environment can cripple it - but that's a different debate.)

The proof is that science, engineering, and math have plenty of very bright,
very obsessive, very hard-working people. But they still produce very few no-
doubt-about-it outright geniuses.

In fact genius is a rare combination of raw domain talent combined with
outstanding creative imagination. The former provides the ability to produce
outstanding work, the latter pushes it over the line with the potential for
game-changing originality.

Together they can _completely transform_ a domain instead of simply broadening
it.

This is not the same as reapplying something already known in a clever and
creative way - which is what talented and gifted people do.

Genius pioneers a fundamental change in the understanding of reality and
massively expands what humans are capable of imagining and doing within it.

~~~
Cougher
"Innate ability sets a talent ceiling. Hard work/time/obsession refine and
manifest raw talent where it's there, but can't compensate when it isn't. (And
a bad environment can cripple it - but that's a different debate.)"

Absolutely. I can't stand it when someone says, "if I did it, anybody can."
Not only is it wrong; it can be downright abusive.

------
mywacaday
About 20 years ago I was having a quiet pint with a friend and he casually
says "I wish I was passionate about something". It always stuck with me, still
haven't found anything I'd consider I'm passionate about, still looking
though!

~~~
chadcmulligan
Its funny, I'm the opposite, there's so many things I'm passionately
interested in. The hard part is picking one or two. My one day I'll have to
get back to that list is enough for a couple of lifetimes. I try top pick the
ones that are the most useful, or perhaps least useless. Keep looking you'll
find something.

~~~
np_tedious
I'm more like you. Into math, music, fitness, nature, literature, movies...

but can I actually say I'm "passionate" about any of them? On any given day,
I've likely spent zero time or effort on at least one of the above. Simply
can't have a day when I've studied math (beyond cursory readings on the
phone), practiced an instrument, worked out, hiked/camped, read, AND watched a
movie

~~~
chadcmulligan
Its hard, I found I just have to pick a few I like the most and leave the rest
go, I promise myself I'll get back to them but it seems less likely as the
years go by. On my holidays I usually get back to something.

------
martonlanga
Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?

~~~
loopz
I was thinking the same thing. Being obsessively interested sounds neat when
you watch others spend their entire lives, eg. collecting stamps and coins.
According to this wisdom, when they find the rare gem that makes them a
fortune they're geniuses. However, who can _will_ themselves into becoming
obsessive with something. Wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating if it is to
take something out of it (ie. opposite of karma-yoga)?

What you _can_ do:

\- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit

\- swim/exercise the body

\- study what you're passionate about

\- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers
who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams

\- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove
yourself away from people

\- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're _not_ doing
it just to score big!

Not so sure people can _will_ themselves to change that much.

You _can_ enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order.
By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what
you already are.

~~~
westoncb
I agree with this. One thing I’d add from personal observation: things get
more interesting the more time you spend with them. I’ve done ‘total
immersion’ kinds of things with both math and the boardgame Go, with pretty
good results in both cases. I pretty much just kept the topic around all the
time for a sustained period. Sometimes that meant reading about history or
philosophy of the subject, consuming related media, etc.

Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at
least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice
configuration.

Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading
about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.

I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the
subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was
intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I
didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of
gratifying experience.

~~~
loopz
Indeed. There are studies about grit and determination over time being strong
indicators for possible later success. In any endeavour having some unknown
value, overlooked by others, there will be periods where you feel all alone,
experience some disinterest or need to grit through some necessary
activities/work in order to push forward. There will not always be happy
feelings about what you do or even why you do it, though such feelings will be
more on the level of superficial aversion and procrastination. In activities
and studies with heavy competition, that competition will be extremely hard to
beat. Both may be overcome by grit and determination, while those with natural
abilities or superior training, often give up earlier due to various unrelated
reasons.

------
pitchups
Prediction:'Bus ticket collecting' will enter our lexicon as a new way to
describe obsessive pursuits with little or no perceived impact - or at least
it would appear to have no foreseeable impact or future to you at that point
in time. The opposite of what you should be doing with your life if you want
to make a difference. As in : "Although I enjoyed my new research area, at
times I wondered if I was merely bus ticket collecting.."

The paradox though is that you cannot know in advance if you are merely bus
ticket collecting or pursuing something that will have a real impact. Just
like Darwin had no way of knowing if his excessive obsession with natural
history would go on to change the world, and lead to the theory of evolution.
In the essay, pg does give heuristics on how to figure out the difference -
but the greater the potential for impact the less likely it is that you will
be able to tell the difference. In other words, the most transformative
discoveries will likely seem most like bus ticket collecting and a wase of
time, at least initially.

------
yingw787
My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity
doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola
Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his
rent ([https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-
about...](https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-nikola-
tesla)). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman"
([http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html](http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html)),
and apocryphal stories indicate he may have written it from his own
experience.

Beyond some point, being smart really isn't a good thing. You can't relate to
people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents
point to you and tell their children to not be like you. You live on top of a
cold, windy, snowy mountain while everybody else lives in a warm and fertile
valley. Yet you choose to live on the mountain anyways, because after you lose
everything, you realize that's just who you are, and there's really nothing
you can do about it beyond accepting it.

And so you are insane. You don't care about being comfortable, or about being
paid well, or about people liking you, or having fewer problems in life, or
anything else that makes sense. You just care about obsessing over that
something.

People always talk about genius like it's some good thing. Maybe sometimes, if
you obsess over something society values. But few people talk about the price
of genius, probably because we're taught from an early age that being smart is
a good thing and so few people go that far off the deep end anyways. I think
it should be said, especially for HN types, that there can always be too much
of a good thing. That it's healthy to relax, not take things so seriously,
have a sense of humor, and relate to other people. That a good life is worth
living. Because to forget that is a life lost.

~~~
ramphastidae
I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is
way overblown and quite damaging.

I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for
social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them
same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality,
these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as
an excuse for antisocial behavior.

Here’s the thing. If you’re so brilliant, you should be able to learn basic
social skills, manners, and hygiene. It’s not that hard. And if you do find it
hard, maybe it’s not because you’re a savant who is above these things, but
because you have simply neglected to develop that skill set.

~~~
anovikov
10x engineers thing is a lot lot simpler than that. In vast majority of cases,
it's just one normal engineer surrounded by a crowd of people who should have
been flipping burgers, but ended up working as 0.1x engineers because of
"talent shortage" which is in fact just some bosses being too greedy to pay
normal wages. Over time, abysmal productivity and quality of their work
becomes the norm, and one normal guy who randomly happened to be there is seen
as a semi-deity.

~~~
VladimirIvanov
Yes, and it's often enabled by the manager and the rest of the team who allow
the 10xer to work from home several days in a row on a sprint until he's
changed the code so drastically that only he can understand it

------
contingencies
Finding inner motivation to do things other people find preposterous, tedious
or uninspiring is the key. One should be driven by sincere curiosity. I don't
know if I share PG's parenting strategy on "leave the generalism for someone
else" \- I think school does a crap job of general education, by dividing and
labeling everything and implying it's covered ground.

------
taurath
Magnus Carlson says this about chess. Paraphrasing, there are probably smarter
people at him, but they’re less likely to be as obsessed with chess and are
more likely to seek novelty elsewhere.

------
notelonmusk
> (...) The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they
> looked promising, other people would already have explored them.

an ode to metaphorical basement dwellers and a warning to those roaming
illuminated paths

    
    
      Nasreddin lost his ring in the basement of his house. He went outside and began searching. A curious passerby asked what he was doing. 
      "I've lost my ring" he said. "Where did you lose it?" asked the man.
      "In the basement of my house" he replied. "Then why not look for it there?" said the man. "Because it's dark in my basement, and I can't see a thing in there!"
    

> (...) But as with any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease
> risk.

and a tool recently mentioned here for evaluating bets

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion)

------
fancyfish
Most people have no productive obsessive interests. They might obsess over
Entertainment Tonight, if anything. That produces nothing of value for broader
society. You might even say it halts growth as a society, corrupting our
cultural fabric.

Geniuses are a gift because they generally apply their obsessions in a way
that brings our culture forward. Investing and trading gurus who pore over
10-Ks or find alpha in trading signals and show incredible returns. Writers
burning the midnight oil producing a prolific amount of high-quality work.
Brian Chesky living in over 30 different AirBnB locations obsessing over the
customer experience.

Hire the obsessive geniuses, then get out of their way. Not all of them will
have a great "vision" or know what a good collaborative framework at work
looks like. Sometimes your job as a founder and leader is to figure out how to
let them flourish.

~~~
overgard
By your process though, you likely wouldn't discover the genius. After all,
you wouldn't know if what they're doing is of value until afterwards. What if
the Entertainment Tonight fanatic ended up writing brilliant blistering and
influential social critiques later because of their obsession with pop
culture? The point is you can't know upfront.

------
jancsika
> For example, it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than
> just consuming something someone else creates.

That heuristic leads to bikeshedding. Try talking to an old white person for
whom rap "doesn't sound like music to me." Inevitably they'll bring out the
big guns-- that rap "just" takes the music that someone else wrote and talks
over it.

Besides, there's no cost to dropping that heuristic. Nobody who scrolls
through cat pics is in danger of thinking they are Vincent van Gogh. And if
some "cat pic scroller" makes a real breakthrough in the artform I'd really
prefer to talk about it without a bunch of grumpy, anti-intellectual gate-
keepers whining, "how is that art?"

~~~
Jarwain
Taking something and talking over it is still creating. It still takes an
active effort that results in something New, independent of how "easy" or
"hard" someone might perceive it to be. Remixing is still creation & creative.

Consuming something someone else creates is more along the lines of Just
listening, or Just reading, or Just observing some sort of art

------
iandanforth
One associated personality trait I've observed in the obsessive and successful
is _guilt free myopia_.

If you either don't notice, or don't care, when people around you are
negatively impacted by your obsession you can get _so_ much more done. I must
emphasize I don't think there's usually any malice involved, just an ability
to forget that not eating dinner with your significant other might make them
mad, or that being late to something might inconvenience a colleague.

There are, of course, serious caveats to this behavior and it can have lasting
negative effects, but people who work well even in the face of attempted
social interruptions or implied responsibilities strike me as quite _free_.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Yeah. When you really realize the price that your children have paid for you
being lost in your own world, it's not so guilt free...

------
account73466
If you are too successful at something then you are probably too local in your
steps/bets - you should make greater steps/bets by risking more in order to
increase your overall progress. It is an optimal rule which was mathematically
derived for convex functions, see the one-fifth rule at
[http://ls11-www.cs.tu-dortmund.de/people/beyer/EA-
glossary/n...](http://ls11-www.cs.tu-dortmund.de/people/beyer/EA-
glossary/node97.html). The ratio itself is problem-dependent but the core idea
is beautiful.

------
pijei75
Sometimes I get angry when reading stuff like this: the reason is that whoever
analyses the genius or success factor always misses among other points and
features the importance of LUCK. Someone could say Luck does not exist for the
prepared mind (paraphrasing Pasteur) but as the author of this post pointed
out , had Darwin been born in 1709 instead of 1809 probably no one would have
heard of him. This is the luck to be in the right place at the right time
doing the right things with the right people.

------
picometer
Reflections from Marie Curie on the value of basic research:

"The story of radiology in war offers a striking example of the unsuspected
amplitude that the application of purely scientific discoveries can take under
certain conditions.

X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the time of the war. The great
catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity, accumulating its victims in
terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the ardent desire to save
everything that could be saved and to exploit every means of sparing and
protecting human life.

At once there appeared an effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of
service. What had seemed difficult became easy and received an immediate
solution. The material and the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment.
All those who did not understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know
learned; those who had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific
discovery achieved the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar
evolution took place in radium therapy, or the medical application of
radiations emitted by the radio elements.

What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development shared between the
new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of the nineteenth century?
It seems that they must make our confidence in disinterested research more
alive and increase our reverence and admiration for it."

------
Bostonian
I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow
domains. (I used to be obsessed with chess, especially chess openings.) This
may be a partial explanation of why there have been more male geniuses. Graham
must be careful about what he writes, but he does say this:

"One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may help explain
why different types of people excel at different kinds of work. Interest is
much more unevenly distributed than ability. If natural ability is all you
need to do great work, and natural ability is evenly distributed, you have to
invent elaborate theories to explain the skewed distributions we see among
those who actually do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of
the skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in
different things.

The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to do great
work after they have children. Here interest has to compete not just with
external obstacles, but with another interest, and one that for most people is
extremely powerful. It's harder to find time for work after you have kids, but
that's the easy part. The real change is that you don't want to."

Both fathers and mothers care about their children, but on average mothers
care more and think more obsessively about them.

~~~
zozbot234
> I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow
> domains.

I don't think this is the case. Males just have low visibility into typical
female 'obsessions' (or just don't care all that much about them), but the
reverse is also generally true. Females tend to obsess about things that have
a 'social' side, like their shoes collection - whereas males are more into
physical, material things that can be played with.

~~~
rhlsthrm
This is exactly right. I've come across this theory of obsession on my own and
I've been helping my wife find what she's obsessed with. She watches things on
YouTube like makeup tutorials that are things I would have never thought she
was obsessed with.

~~~
satyrnein
Let's not be too hasty in concluding women's attention to their appearance and
their children is completely genetic when all throughout history these were
duties pushed onto them.

Darwin got to say "I'll be in my study" and "you take care of the kids and
dinner and everything else" was just automatically implied.

~~~
belorn
You are arguing against an imaginary argument. Parent and grand parent comment
did not say anything about genetics.

Darwin could go inside the study because his gender role was fulfilled by
being rich. Had he been poor he might have said "I will be in the coal mine",
and getting slowly and horrible killed.

Very few know people in history had the privilege to freely obsess over things
which is outside their gender role, especially if the result leads to them not
fulling that role through other means.

~~~
satyrnein
This whole subthread is speculation about the role of gender in the choice of
obsessive hobbies, or am I imagining that?

I agree with you that most men over the course of history did not have the
luxury that Darwin did.

~~~
belorn
The comment from Bostonian did that. That person speculated that gender
influence how obsessive a person is.

zozbot234 comment below that said "I don't think this is the case.", arguing
instead that low visibility over gender lines makes people think that gender
has an impact how obsessive a person is.

rhlsthrm comment below that one said "This is exactly right".

This is why I said parent and grandparent, ie zozbot234 and rhlsthrm comments,
did not include genetics in their arguments, and I interpreted your comment as
arguing against them as if they had argued in favor of genetics. If I am wrong
and you directed your argument against the grandgrandparent then I am sorry
for that interpretation.

------
talkingtab
Going out on a limb - because I have great respect for Paul Graham, I find
this wrong headed. People have two kinds of thinking. Linear and Pattern. The
problem with Pattern thinking is that it can't talk. Linear thinking can talk
(think about it). How do we recognize faces? Do we use linear analysis - not
at all, we just know. Is this genius? No. We all can do it, and we do it all
the time. So no, this is not genius, this is just something we do and that
linear thinking cannot explain. A la flatland.

Lets suppose this is true, that we are of two minds and one can articulate and
the other cannot. Can we culture our intuitive mind? We often call Pattern
thinking intuition, and Paul Graham raises a good condition for intuition, one
that we are beginning to understand from neural networks - that you need lots
of data and lots of training with data to have good intuition. Obsession will
do it. Another prerequisite, as he points out is disinterest. You can either
attempt to find the pattern or you can attempt to prove the pattern.

Personally, I like to think of this as original thinker. We all can be
original thinkers, and in fact many startups come from original thinking. We
see something around us with a pattern that makes no sense so we attempt to
think, we essay, about the matter.

Just a thought.

------
amursft
Paul became incredibly successful. I wonder what he thinks his own bus ticket
was?

Going deep on a topic seems like great advice with kids, and I wish schools
allowed for more of it.

~~~
chubot
I think he would say "writing short programs", which leads to Lisp.

He designed the Arc language before he started ycombinator. He designed the
Bel language after he left ycombinator. So it seems like ycombinator (and
changing an entire industry) was an interlude between Lisps :)

If you had to rate obsessions on a scale from 0-100 on how likely they are to
be useful, I would rate programming languages around a 5/100\. It's
exceedingly unlikely to come to anything (which I know from working on my own
language :) )

Related:

[https://famicol.in/language_checklist.html](https://famicol.in/language_checklist.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784085](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784085)

------
playing_colours
From the article: “The usual plan in education is to start with a broad,
shallow focus, then gradually become more specialized. But I've done the
opposite with my kids. I know I can count on their school to handle the broad,
shallow part, so I take them deep."

I am with him on it. I witness this pattern in parents who seem to care about
well rounded development of their kids. They keep their children constantly
busy with a wide number of activities: on Monday the kid goes to dance
lessons, on Tuesday they have English class, followed by drawing and music
classes on Wednesday, etc. But round things cannot pierce and cut efficiently.

What if we focus on a single thing - that the kid shows some interest in - and
encourage them to stick with it, focus on learning details and mastering the
subject? Will it result in acquiring the skills and passion for diving deep
into a chosen area, for exploring distant corners and intricate caves far from
the crowds of tourists; not to be constantly lured by the songs of Sirens,
that imprison people with generous dopamine shots of superficial excitement of
shallow waters of something novel: a new flashy tech, another cool study
subject, TV series, games, etc.

------
fzeroracer
I have to disagree with this analysis on a couple different levels.

First, the opening statement that great work is a combination of natural
ability + determination. I don't believe this to be the case, and I think this
logic only works when you're doing post-hoc analysis for why certain people
did well and others did not. There are plenty of people who had both natural
ability and determination, yet failed throughout history. Some of them only
becoming known long after their death (and whom lived in poverty to that
point), others which failed because their choice of interest was considered to
be the 'bus ticket collector' at the time.

Which leads me to my second point: We don't actually know if someone being a
'bus ticket collector' is valuable or not until long after their obsessive
interest. For example, there are people that archived videos of various new
stations. Those videos at the time were considered useless, but now they're
more valuable because no one else was really obsessively archiving said video.
This sort of thing isn't going to make someone rich or grant them status, but
it's something that turned out to be very valuable to society as a whole and
something that could be used to make someone rich.

Which ties into the fact that a lot of this is luck. You have to be lucky that
what you're obsessed with is truly unique, that it's something that can earn
you value now, and that you have the support network or monetary means to
seize opportunities when they come across you. Sometimes the greatest
discoveries are things that have been found solely by accident. You might be
lacking a certain item, and you substitute it with something else which leads
to a big breakthrough and so forth. Obsessive interest can help lead us to
something great, but sometimes we simply trip upon something greater along the
way.

------
kirse
On a more spiritual note, we're all bus ticket collectors. PG is defining
"matters" as "what can make money", which is fine for a business-focused
essay, but it does what we all attempt to do - convince ourselves that _our_
domain has significance.

The truth is, whether we're bus ticket collectors or Bill Gates, we're all
headed to the grave. Bus tickets or billionaires, we're all getting burned up.
Both science and religion hint at the same endgame, best to ponder if there's
something beyond that which changes the "what matters" equation in the living
short-term.

Somewhat interesting PG cites both Newton and Pasteur in his essay - men who
were obsessively pulled by their desire to understand their Creator and the
infinitude of His magnificent creation:

Pasteur: " _Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern
materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed
at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the
laboratory._ "

~~~
justinmeiners
> PG is defining "matters" as "what can make money"

Did Newton or Darwin make a lot of money?

------
jariel
I was thinking a lot about this myself recently: those people that have a
'compulsive, arbitrary obsession' with something and the resulting wealth of
knowledge they tend to have.

I also don't believe it's really about 'love or passion' per say, it often
seems to be more of an obsessive/compulsive attitude, like a behaviour that's
in their DNA 'just the way they are'.

Whenever I read about 'some great person' I see how there's 100x more to them
than 'what we see'. There's an obsession to the subject, the 'product' is just
the tip of the iceberg.

Think about the recently released 'Mr. Robison' biopic and have a gander into
his past talks. This man was not just about making some hum-dum kids show.
This guy was not a sociologist, he was an _ordained Minister_ , and hugely
empathetic guy who was clearly obsessed with understanding the wellbeing of
children, and the show was his vehicle for communicating issues and also
communicating 'values' as he saw them. He would do a lot of 'research' in
terms of interviews, questionnaires, etc. Though we might be smug about this
in the sense that it wasn't very formal - I think we should be cautious to
dismiss his work - we can learn _a lot_ about any subject by simply inquiring,
doing, observing. We definitely do not want to do this with clinical drug
trials, and we probably want to still do more formal sociological research,
but I don't think anything can replace his deep commitment to the cause.

Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, Serena Williams, Justin Timberlake, Enrique
Eglisias - these people were 'trained from birth' for their roles and each
have vast wealth and knowledge of their disciplines. Clearly instituted into
the trades by their parents, and probably a little bit forcibly on occasions,
they will have nevertheless had to encompass that kind of 'arbitrary
conviction'.

------
reedwolf
You need WDA: Well-Directed Autism

------
notatoad
>we may be able, by cultivating interest, to cultivate genius.

That assumes that interest is something that can be cultivated, which i'm
skeptical of. If somebody else had tried to become as interested in natural
history as Darwin was, could they have achieved his genius?

I think interest is something that can be discovered, but not cultivated. You
find something that you are interested in, you don't choose something to
become interested in. Not everybody has the same innate level of curiosity,
and not everybody will discover the thing that really interests them during
their lifetime. But hacking away at something trying to cultivate interest so
you can achieve genius doesn't sound productive to me - if you aren't
naturally interested in something, don't waste your time on it. Or if you do
sink your time into it, spend that time being productive, instead of trying to
become interested.

------
b_emery
In contrast to the essay, my hypothesis is currently that interest is
developed. I used to be in the 'born talented camp', but then after reading
_Peak_ , _The Talent Code_ , and other books on the subject (and essentially
reviewing the research) I developed a 'born interested' hypothesis. In other
words, some are born with innate interests that drive them toward deep and
intense practice, developing skills and abilities or knowledge, that make them
'outliers'. _Peak_ touches on this subject, and while it is certainly true
that some level of interest is inherent, the (preliminary?) evidence is that
this is only an inclination.

My personal experience (speaking as someone who is somewhat of an expert in a
rather obscure oceanographic sub-field) is that the development of talent and
interest (can) go hand in hand. You dig in, develop some skills, this opens up
some possibilities that encourage (and provide encouragement) for you to
develop further interest and further abilities, etc. The most radical form of
the hypothesis is that we can develop a deep interest in almost anything. The
20 yr old me had no interest in the things that I am deeply interested in now.

For parents and future parents I will note that in contrast to PG's
suggestion, having children has been a significant motivator and my best work
has resulted in part from the desire to provide for them. It was also produced
during the last 10 yrs that I have been a parent. I am far from any kind of
genius or outlier however, and it seems likely that the time required to be
one would conflict with the time spent raising children.

Overall, the evidence is that the brain is extremely pliable, that elite
performers in any field put in many intensive hours of practice, and that to
some extent their deep interest in their field developed over time. Perhaps
conclusive research about the innateness of interest is out there. In the mean
time, I also experiment with encouraging the depths of my children's
interests.

~~~
wehrkeoruw
I agree with you, but would go even further and say you're not born
interested, the set of experiences you have are what shape your interest. It's
both an important and useful idea to consider that people are born blank
slates, and experiences drive us.

------
peter_retief
I have an obsessive personality and often become passionately absorbed by
different things. I have worked as an artist and as a metallurgist and many
things between. I have always (rightly) feared is that my constant switching
has left me stretched.A Jack of all Trades but a master of none. I am OK with
that.

------
ignoramous
One of the stuble ways an obsession goes unnoticed, I believe, is due to
schelp blindness [0].

For instance, a decade ago, I became super obsessed abt the state of emergency
first-aid after going through harrowing experience of seeing one of my friends
die stranded on a highway because the responders reached after 2 hours.
Despite that, I never acted on it. I'm glad folks at
[http://gethelpnow.in](http://gethelpnow.in) (Uber for Ambulance) are going to
fix it for India, and it is a great business opportunity too seeing how
helpless and desperate the emergency situation really gets, compared to the
West.

Speaking of ambulances, one of my cousins volunteers for the famed St. John's
Ambulance Brigade [1] in Bombay and they were one of the first responders to
the 2008 Bombay Terror Attacks [2]. Even though they're well funded and well-
run for a non-profit, I firmly believe a for-profit business with skin-in-the-
game would be able to provide more value.

I've been curious to the point of obsession abt a lot of things a lot of times
and have seen numerous successful companies that were later built by sheer
determination and rifle focus on solving the problem by the respective
founding teams. When I see these companies (even in their infancy when success
is not obvious), I have that urge to want to go work for them but end up
stalking their progress instead, and that's because, I believe, I've been
obsessed abt the problem they solve.

In any case, it is always easier said than done.

[0] [http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Ambulance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Ambulance)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks)

------
zwischenzug
Reading this reminded me of the Steve Jobs quote at the end of his
commencement speech:

'Stay hungry. Stay foolish.'

[https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/](https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505/)

------
javajosh
_> a disinterested obsession with something that matters_

Aha! It's official then, I'm a software architecture genius.

But seriously though, even if you're curious and obsessed, does that really
make you a genius? You might be obsessed with general relativity but
contribute nothing to the field.

------
Finnucane
The example of Darwin kind of glosses over the fact that naturalists were
becoming interested in ideas about evolution. It was controversial and nobody
had any real good ideas, but it’s not exactly true that Darwin had no idea
where he was going with that.

------
whatitdobooboo
Using the examples of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci (as depicted through
Walter Isaacson’s biographies on them) it seems like the “opposite” may also
be true. Being immensely curious about various subjects and applying them to
one another would definitely have merit by the same examples PG is using in
this article. One can definitely make the argument by saying Steve Jobs was
obsessed with design - but i’m not sure it was an obsession with design as a
discipline. The same with Leonardo can be said about painting, was the
obsession to make his paintings better? Or was it just a culmination about
being curious about many things?

------
rayascott
So he's saying you have to have OCD to get anywhere, because that's what
collecting bus tickets, or spotting trains is. It's a disorder. Calling it a
theory is quite a stretch. And tacking on a bunch of "things" the theory says,
is just stabbing at the dark.

"An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent anything can."
\- how I'd categorise the entire article. Ironically it's also an accurate
categorisation of one's involvement in the Y Combinator Seed project: "to the
extent anything can".

Let's encourage everyone to develop OCD for things that matter. Good luck with
that.

------
_Microft
Side note: there might be coming more new essays from pg again:

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1198189199641452544](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1198189199641452544)

~~~
vaylian
Thank you for this info! I was just checking and he hasn't published any new
essays in the last 2 years! I am really happy about new wisdom :-)

------
arbuge
> It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to predict.
> They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good time to be
> obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had been born in 1709
> instead of 1809, we might never have heard of him.

This risk might be somewhat mitigated by the changing level of societal
interest in different areas over time serving as a guide to interesting fields
of study. If Darwin had been born earlier, surrounded by an entirely different
set of books, writings, and people, he might also have been a lot less likely
to be interested in natural history.

~~~
viburnum
Darwin was also lucky to have been born very rich.

------
bbanyc
In the last year or so I've grown increasingly cynical about "genius." Maybe
it's all bus tickets. (I know my obsessions certainly are.)

Great people are almost never good people and I'd rather be good than great.

------
powerset
On the subject of encouraging kids to go deep and explore whatever they're
interested in learning, I had that opportunity as a kid who homeschooled, and
I think it benefited me a lot. Sure, I still had to spend some time learning
things I was less interested in, like memorizing times tables, but I feel like
the freedom to spend 50% or more of my time going deep and learning whatever I
want (this is called "unschooling") did a huge amount to cultivate a lifelong
love for learning that has served me well. It would have been hard to get that
in public school.

------
77544cec
"Spiritual" or "visionary" experiences are very saillent when considering
exceptional scientific feats.

Heisenberg: suddenly realized he had to study physics on a bike when he was a
teenage boy.

Einstein: was driven by Mach's teenage vision of a metaphysics of pure
relativity.

Souriau (mathematician): would come up with new concepts in dreams.

Voevodsky: would get mathematical insights by talking to DMT-like entities
(but did not consume DMT).

de Maillet (discovered sea level varied across millenia): had an angel tell
him he had a destiny and would do great discoveries.

Etc...

------
amirswoop
As I read the article I could really relate to being able to get really deep
into a subject even though it might not be whats "popular" by society. I truly
believe its very important for parents to let their kids "obsess" over things
that might not "scale". At the same time, it's important that kids get deep
into the things that they are interested in rather than just consume and waste
their time.

------
DennisP
This reminded my of a chapter from _Surely You 're Joking, Mr. Feynman_ (or
perhaps its sequel).

At one point he was burned out on physics. He took a break. One day he saw a
juggler spinning plates on sticks (or something like that) and started working
out the physics of it, just for fun. People asked him what that was good for
and he said nothing, it's just interesting. One thing led to another, and
that's how he ended up with his Nobel.

------
quickthrower2
Does something need a “result” to be genius? Isn’t most of mathematics
abstract, so the reward is the discovery itself? But in physics a theory is
not enough because it gets disproven and you are no longer a genius? I’d
rather peg genius to the intellectual qualities and determination and focus,
but say it’s still genius even if the result isn’t widely relevant to
humankind or whatever people are interested in at that time.

------
agumonkey
Is there a place for people passionated but disinterested ? the mental burden
of company structures forbids me to work there, but even if I do another job,
I keep reading about combinatorics, trees and grammars on the side .. it's
just an innate need I always had even as a small child (obviously not the
combinatorics of grammatical structures .. just comtemplating and thinking
about abstract ideas)

~~~
chongli
I think pg is arguing that passionate, disinterested people ought to be
founders, if their object of passion matters anyway.

------
Merrill
This is why basic research is so hard to manage. If a company is no longer
interested in researching area X and instead wants to shift focus to area Y,
there is no real alternative to outplacing the area X researchers and hiring
new for area Y.

Trying to shift the interest of area X researchers only results in their
coming up with rationalizations about how what they have been doing all along
is somehow related to Y.

------
gauMah
I was watching a video recently posted on 3Blue1Brown channel
([https://youtu.be/Agbh95KyWxY](https://youtu.be/Agbh95KyWxY)) He raises a
very related point in his first answers. He attributes a certain playfulness
and curiosity alongside expertise as some sort of necessary condition for
paradigm-changing research.

------
SubiculumCode
Empirically, I'd say most progress is made not by geniuses, but regular joe-
smo scientists and engineers attacking problems in their field for incremental
gains in understanding. I tire of the hero worship and mythologies we place on
genius when I know that most of the time genius just means right place right
time on the shoulders of 'incremental' giants.

------
JoeAltmaier
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell are good examples of this. Their
obsessiveness with computers combined with the technology and market
opportunities opening up - they were a product of their times. Like the great
railroad magnates of the 1800's, they were essentially the same person (same
schools, same upbringing) combined with obsession and opportunities.

------
carapace
Someone once said to Yo-Yo Ma, "Oh I'd give my life to play like you do." To
which he replied, "I did."

------
rdiddly
The value judgments necessary to even construct the questions this essay tries
to answer, kind of make the whole thing self-referential and self-fulfilling.
Has "genius" been adequately defined before getting started? Has "great work?"

First we have the concept of an obsessive interest in something. But this
apparently isn't "genius" unless the interest is in something that "matters."
Matters to whom? The collecting of bus tickets matters to the bus ticket
collector. People whose work _a great number of people_ regard as great or
genius, are by definition, working on things that _a great number of people_
find important. Is it a voting thing, we need popularity? I thought our
interest was _disinterested_.

Besides which, being obsessed with any single thing sounds suspiciously like
the idea of a "calling," which I finally had to reject because I never had
one. I had more like 6 things I was interested in. And I've pursued each, in
turn, with a varying amounts of effort that in some cases could've been
characterized as obsessive, but only for a time. I went deep but not long. And
I got surprisingly far in each, in a shorter period of time than most people.
In short, I suppose I'm a generalist, or you could uncharitably say, a
dilettante. Am I not a "genius?" Have I not done "great work?" You can't
answer, because I'm not popular, and you've never heard of me. I just want to
point out in particular, that you can't answer "no." Genius and great work are
all over the place out there, and they don't need to be acknowledged to be
genius.

------
zatkin
>Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets? It probably
happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because these people don't
become famous.

Not everyone wants to become famous based on their interests. They just want
to do what they enjoy. Their (non-) creative interest may pay dividends. Or it
may not.

------
classified
Those are incoherent ramblings of an underdeveloped brain. My advice: If
you're going to obsess over something that may or may not be pointless, at
least make it so that you're getting sordidly rich doing it. Maybe somebody
notices that you made pointlessness a moot point and calls you a disruptive
genius.

------
HiroshiSan
The greatest embodiment of this essay I've come across recently is a Korean
artist named Kim Jung Gi, known for his ability to conjur up epic scenes with
a brush pen. As well as his obsession with drawing.

[https://youtu.be/aoqu5SEFqRI](https://youtu.be/aoqu5SEFqRI)

------
floki999
Thank you, Paul Graham, on behalf of obsessive collectors everywhere! This
also supports the ‘no free-lunch’ adage. There is merit in exploring uncharted
territory, purely for the sake of it, but it is hard work with no guarantees
of finding treasure except satisfaction of doing what you are interested in.

------
rdlecler1
What strikes me as strange is that is intelligence provides so many fitness
advantages (up to a point) why is there such wide variation in intelligence
especially when there seems to be very little (negligible?) biological cost.
One would think you’d be normally distributed around a much tighter range.

------
fuzzfactor
>But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea that's also
rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great work, you also have
to waste a lot of time.

>In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that rule holds
here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great work is to be
willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn out to be every bit as
unpromising as they seem.

So true.

With highly capable instrumentation, each type of pursuit can often be seen as
a potential lifetime effort so careful compromise needs to be made from the
earliest time.

Musically, a singular focus on jazz, or classical, or pop music for instance
can be the most legitimate path to top performance in a recognized idiom.
Alternatively, other performers might spread themselves thinner between
genres, sometimes only for practice or personal satisfaction by those whose
professional performance is in a single genre itself.

And that's only recognized genres. What if the instrument itself still has
more possibilities to offer?

A practioner (or hobbyist) could go off on a tanget, even a direction known
from the outset not expected to be recognized, and whether it was a waste of
time really depends.

It's possible that higher levels of performance can be achieved by greater
development of instrument familiarity at the expense of focused musical
practice that could have been accomplished in its place, and the outcome could
be different than that which could be achieved otherwise.

Same goes for scientific instruments.

If you're going to break new ground, you're going to need to experiment.

And of course most experiments are going to fail, that's why they are called
experiments.

To attempt completely avoiding having this type of failure waste any of your
time whatsoever, you can simply try to never experiment, at least not in any
way you are aware of.

But if you want to reach new milestones, you can't let that stop you, and
since you are going to be going forward with many projects which will never be
fruitful anyway, might as well include some with even less of an obvious
chance.

You will best work harder and smarter than those focusing only on the
recognized stuff, and can not become dependent on unbroken progress.

>If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would
it? >AEinstein

~~~
sjg007
Musicians who are breadth players typically become backing/house band members.
You see these folks all the time in awards shows, concerts etc...

~~~
fuzzfactor
Yup, it can be helpful being able to perform in a variety of mainstream
opportunities that may arise, whether you are experimental or not.

------
amelius
But should the bus ticket collector start a company around bus tickets or
should it remain a hobby?

~~~
grisha
I think bus ticket collecting was chosen as an example by the author exactly
because starting a company about it is ridiculous to think about. So we can
discuss just inner interest in something without thinking about outer reward.

------
scottlegrand2
Interesting take on intelligence. It also explains why people who have such
passion frequently end up "bad cultural fits(tm)" among those who don't.

Edit: I'm always surprised by which of my posts get the downvotes. Wonder whom
I'm offending this time.

------
amykyta
So it’s a feedback loop between ability and interest. With the two combined
and progress registering people continue on. But what’s the wellspring of
interest and is ability largely a gift or can it be cultivated?

------
bbotond
I just wanted to say that I love pg's essays. Every time one of them is posted
here I get excited because I know I'm going to read something very
interesting. How can he be so consistently good?

------
tempestn
"If you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be
important but would be really interesting, what would it be?"

I don't know, but now I want to put some thought into it.

------
jawns
> If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it:
> to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

A big missing piece of the equation is wealth, or at least financial support.
That gives a budding genius the freedom to pursue their interests, the ability
to fail knowing that their life or livelihood doesn't hang in the balance.

Granted, sometimes genius begets wealth, but usually a person needs at least
some support early in their life/career.

And then, who knows whether the wealth they accumulate (if they play their
cards right) is enough to allow them to hit repeated dead-ends in pursuit of
their disinterested obsession.

------
westoncb
There's an aspect of this that strikes me as a little strange: the basic
recommendation here seems substantially more to the benefit of society than to
the individual who might be encouraged to cultivate their own genius by this
method (or a parent in their kids).

> _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).

------
jeffdavis
What sbout obsessions that are useful but still mundane in the big picture?
Obsessing about party/event planning, for instance?

Or what about dangerous obsessions, like power?

------
sagichmal
This feels good and insightful to read. But is there any data or strong
historical evidence to support it? Or does it have predictive power?

------
cpr
It’s interesting that Paul has, once again, figured out an important
idea—unschooling in this case—ab initio.

Cf John Holt.

------
ixtli
Does this cover the implied subtext? He’s writing about it because a rentier
class profits off of that obsession by maintaining an environment that
encourages it even when it goes to far and harms the obsessor.

That’s what “something that matters” means.

Capital decides what matters. Bus tickets matter to the person collecting
them. They don’t matter to an outside like Paul graham because they don’t
result in capital.

------
heyflyguy
Imagine being the guy that got obsessively interested in bitcoin when only a
few people were mining it.

~~~
zozbot234
...and then sold it all for $5 each or so. Plenty of folks have been there.
The best case scenario at this point is finding your old HD/backup somewhere
with that early-mined bitcoin wallet you had totally forgotten about.

------
thomasmarriott
"It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."

-Einstein

------
spasquali
Nice summary of Malcolm Gladwell's work. Weirdly uncredited.

------
xiaodai
This theory is well known in Chinese it is known as 不疯魔，不成活

------
TheTrotters
Relevant SSC post: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-
fascina...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-
fascinations/)

~~~
prlin
Wow that was a very interesting analogy and theory. Thanks for sharing! I've
also never heard of SSC before. I saw the top 10 posts SSC lists in the about
page, but do you have any other recommendations for articles relevant to the
HN crowd?

------
chrisweekly
Why doesn't paulgraham.com support HTTPS?

------
spyckie2
What I find interesting is these two contrasting undertones:

1) Geniuses who are obsessed with their own interests, not the outcome of
pursuing their interest

2) PG obsessed with outcome (great work, being famous, leaving your mark on
important topics, etc) and trying to control what you're interested in to
affect the outcome.

The recipe for genius work is to be crazy obsessed. But according to the
article, to be crazy obsessed with something is not something that you can
necessarily control:

> Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. They didn't discover
> the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising, but because
> they couldn't help it.

> But it may be that much of the skew has a simpler explanation: different
> people are interested in different things.

Yet there's also attempts to reason about how to control your own interests
towards meaningful impact within the recognized limitations (that talent and
interest both matter, and the implication is that some people just may not be
born with talent or interest).

It reads like classical Greek Mythology - trying to fight against fate with
the sheer force of will in the struggle to control how one leaves their mark
on history.

Real geniuses ironically probably don't care about how to leave their mark on
history. But on the other hand, being obsessed with leaving a mark on history
may be a certain kind of genius as well.

I think the article could be improved by spending more time doing systems
thinking rather than self optimization for the conclusion.

I think the self optimization part of the article (how to maximize your impact
on history) does not yield much insight or conversation and hence reads
poorly.

However, how to build systems (like educational systems) that increase the
output of genius work seems much more promising direction for actionable
insights but it is taken very lightly.

\---

Just because I have the thought.

The cognitive functions side of MBTI blends very well into an article like
this. Cognitive functions states that there are things that we are more
"innately interested in" than others, but instead of discrete topics, these
are more like input senses.

Consider your 5 physical senses as inputs into your brain. Your brain usually
notices or cares about some of them much more than others (Tone deaf vs
perfect pitch). Some people "care" so much that every time a sense is
violated, they will definitely let you know (what's that smell???).

Similarly, cognition can be viewed as inputs into your brain, and cognitive
functions are the different senses into your brain. I'll list out a few:

Ti (introverted thinking) - the sense of whether something is factually right

Te (extroverted thinking) - the sense of whether something is systematically
consistent

Fi (introverted feeling) - the sense of whether something induces harmony

Fe (extroverted feeling) - the sense of whether something creates harmonious
society

etc.

Cognitive functions are split between what you take in as information and how
you evaluate the information. The above is how you evaluate information. The
following is how you take it in:

Ni (introverted intuition) - you notice ideas as complete building blocks
within themselves

Ne (extroverted intuition) - you notice ideas as interconnecting with other
ideas

Si (introverted sensing) - you notice the concrete world as complete
experiences within themselves

Se (extroverted sensing) - you notice the concrete world as interconnecting
with other experiences

Cognitive functions states that you have primary functions that you use to
perceive the world, just like someone may notice sounds much more than touch
or smell.

It suggests a vocabulary for talking about interest and obsession.

------
mola
Being born right, number one factor of success.

~~~
mola
Why the down votes?

------
toxicFork
Thank you for this article.

This seems to me that it applies so much to other aspects of life as well, not
only for being "a genius". Perhaps this applies more to a particular subset of
people who will think on this line.

For example, take the obsession and dial it down a little bit so it becomes a
passion instead. Or even further so it becomes ordinary motivation. It becomes
almost a linear scale that should match motivation with the effort you may
need to achieve anything towards a particular direction. One may say, "that's
common sense", but let's consider it anyway. Combine this with the fact that
with any field, the further you go outwards, the more effort you will need to
take another step. This is similar to the energy you will need to accelerate
further, once you reach a particular speed. The faster you go, the more energy
you need to go even faster.

In order to start anything that may have enough of a struggle, we need to have
enough of a motivation to have started it. Otherwise, when the times get tough
and we face a brick wall, we can remind ourselves of that initial motivation
to be brave enough to even consider running through that wall head-first even
if it may hurt us in the short term. Ideally we should have tools or other
people to help us in this task but when it comes to many unexplored areas of
science, or even starting our own company, these tools or other people are not
so available to us, therefore it is likely we will need that determination to
allow us to do that sacrifice. Luckily, these tools/people problems are being
resolved more and more every day. But, the further we go, the more we will
need, so the thought still applies with the same effect, forever.

There should also be an expanding curiosity aspect to it, too. You have
touched on this with being interested in different things. However, we need to
actively keep in mind how these different things may be related to each other,
perhaps literally, perhaps at a more abstract level. This way, we can continue
our exploration of both by using these overlaps as foundations for new land
between those landmasses. So that we will not need a complete context switch
to consider the different subjects, but we keep building more bridges between
them. I like to consider the metaphors of the steam engine to help describe
the mind. I am unsure if Freud came up with these connections but they helped
expand our minds about what it thinks about itself anyway.

So, does it mean, we are excused to say "follow your dreams"? I believe so.
There may be a lot of other people who will say "that is foolish, you will
struggle to live". If you look at the bigger picture and say, let's take that
seriously: if 100 people try to follow their dreams and only 1 make it while
the rest of the 99 suffer. The more you encourage, the more you make that 100
a 1000, and the 1 a 10. The 99 becomes 990. Now, the question becomes, is it
worth it? You can guess my answer to this but I will leave it unanswered with
the hopes to further discussion.

------
wehrkeoruw
I'm not sure it's a given that natural talent is even part of the equation. A
decent number of the behavioral economics who have written popular books
(Grit, Peak, to name a few) seem to be converging on the idea that talent
isn't really worth discussing as a prerequisite to greatness.

That especially follows if you consider the luck factor mentioned in this
article; is it really talent to have a unique way of looking at a topic that
moves the topic forward? Or is the uniqueness merely a factor of the set of
experiences a person just happens to bring to bear on a problem?

I say this because far too many people get caught up on talent, trying to find
what their talent is, when they'd be much more productive simply obsessing.

------
systemdtrigger
Paul Graham is the same blogger who "realized" Microsoft is dead quite a while
back. Genius.

~~~
neonate
The Microsoft he was writing about was the feared monopolist of the 90s. He
was right about that and still is.

