I wonder if there are equivalent figures in other fields that we never hear about. Reminds me of László Rátz, who taught high school math to luminaries like von Neumann and Wigner (whose work forms the foundation of the math behind quantum mechanics, later worked on the Manhattan Project). Then again, Budapest at that time period produced a great many other world-class scientists and mathematicians (von Karman, of JPL and Karman line fame, Teller, from the Ulam-Teller nuclear bomb design, George Polya, Dennis Gabor), so maybe there are confounding factors there.
First, Hungary was part of the largest country in Europe at that time (ignoring Russia, which also had a huge Asiatic part), the Austro-Hungarian empire, so it was a cultural and intellectual center. There is also the legacy of the famous Eötvös competition, started by Baron Loránd Eötvös, which inspired the math Olympiad.
Winners of the competition include Teller, Leo Szilard, von Karman, … So this emergence was hardly a coincidence.
Hungary at the turn of the 20th century was well poised to create the intellectual legacy it had in math and physics in the coming 100 years:
Joe Satriani was the guitar teacher of a lot of famous guitarists:
"His students included Steve Vai, Kirk Hammett of Metallica, David Bryson of Counting Crows, Kevin Cadogan from Third Eye Blind, Larry LaLonde of Primus and Possessed, Alex Skolnick of Testament, Rick Hunolt (ex-Exodus), Phil Kettner of Lȧȧz Rockit, Geoff Tyson of T-Ride, Charlie Hunter and David Turin."
I hadn't heard of Charlie Hunter before, but he appears to be quite talented. Apparently, he's known for playing custom guitars with 7 or 8 strings, with simultaneous guitar and a bass parts.
This is the first video I pulled up on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/La2gmwSQJo0?t=83
Check out the fret arrangement on his guitar.
Great question. I also wonder how much of it is an eye for talent vs just _believing_ in people. My guess is it's a mix.
Some of the best managers and mentors I've met have a combination of both an eye for talent but also an ability to truly believe in someone, and sometimes just having someone believe in you can really turn someone's confidence, career, and even life around.
There are seemingly small moments that stick with us for a lifetime -- if we had more small moments that highlighted our brilliance we'd see some incredible changes in the world.
Everyone 'shows up' at some point in their life. Some march to the beat of their own drum and continue to drive from inside, while others are lost because the hesitation in 'am I even doing this right?' was left unanswered.
Truthfully, this is the most infuriating thing about social media -- there are true moments of brilliance that they see on a daily basis (when someone choses to sign off, how they replay a certain section of a podcast, following links and references made in other mediums, etc) that we could be highlighting and praising... yet none of them do.
I can say that the quality of some of my professors completely affected my strengths today. Orthogonal to how they believed in me (which also plays a role imo). I had a very good analytics professor and to this day I can remember most theorems and I’m still fairly good there. My number theory teachers were shit though, and I’m still being affected by it today.
Andrea del Verrocchio might count, although (just like early 20th century Budapest) Renaissance Italy had an abundance of talent.
> Leonardo da Vinci became an apprentice [of Verrocchio] by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years. Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi.
For 5 superstars I can imagine an “abundance of talent” as a random event. But for 50 it’s not — it’s a culture that for some reason has created the conditions for these superstars to emerge and it’s worth analyzing what those conditions are.
I didn't mean anything specific by abundance of talent. Just an expression. Of course, the Renaissance had unique historical conditions that led to its artistic flourishing.
I think there are millions of people like that to various degrees, whether as individuals or as members of supportive communities or societies.
Like many, I've shone the spotlight on or helped many eventually successful people and it's part of "being involved" and using your influence for good whether you're a teacher, coworker, publisher, influencer, or even just voting up posts on HN :-)
We all stand "on the shoulders of giants" but I suspect most successful people are stood on hundreds of giants rather than single pivotal figures.
A lot of the other comments are describing teachers who went on to have successful or talented students, much like the parent. Consider the inverse case, which probably sounds out of left field to you - the cult leader.
Many cults start out with self-help gurus or educators who create closed groups with high demands. Cult leaders often promise special abilities to their students, if they just stick with them. The results are pretty much the opposite of what the parent is describing - the members are lost history and often don't achieve much and the narcissism of the cult leader defines the group. Unlike what the OP is describing - the proper teacher is more or less obscure and the network of students all go onto achieve highly.
I guess this is just a long, roundabout way to say that humility and skill amplify much farther than even genuine skill and charisma. Maybe there's something to also be said about the altruism of a good teacher versus the high-demands of a cultic following.
>Then again, Budapest at that time period produced a great many other world-class scientists and mathematicians, so maybe there are confounding factors there.
> The modern United States is about 2% Jewish. Hungary in 1900 was about 5%. The most Jewish city in America, New York, is about 15% Jewish. Budapest in 1900 was 25%. It was one of the most Jewish large cities anywhere in history, excepting only Israel itself. According to Wikipedia, the city’s late 19th-century nickname was “Judapest”.
Ernie Adams - Bill Belichick's football brain. He's probably a somewhat big part of the reason the Pats have been so successful for so long with other teams' "cast offs".
Twitter is for Rodney Dangerfield one liners. These essays are always a terrible format for communicating such things. Even the 3rd party collection tools miss some context.
Especially when you want to comment on one bit but it gets lost in the noise. Which ironically is the whole point of Twitter.
More generally it mostly missed the ability to edit, to tweak context, and to structure content properly.
Oh well, no better than not getting the story at I guess.
“You guys hear about this coronavirus? That’s a bad deal I tell ya. They say I gotta work from home. I said ‘What do you mean I gotta work from home?’. They said ‘It means you gotta go work from home’. So I went home to the wife and she said ‘how was work?’ And I said ‘fine’ and I’ve been in this bar ever since. Tip your waitress!”
This is amazing. It’s not funny. Yet, as I read it my mind did so in a perfect Dangerfield impression and I found myself laughing and legitimately thinking it funny.
Can I just say, I hate tweet storms as a medium, but hell if I didn't read to the end and if that wasn't the best packaged ad (for CompoundWriting) I've ever seen.
"Cloaca" is a Dutch theatre play/film that has this idea of being able to spot real talent as one of the starting points of the story.
One of the main characters is an art historian and archivist at a municipality with this ability. Ignored by his superiors, they keep him happy by letting him pick out one painting from the depot in the basement every year for his birthday. Due to his ability he knows which paintings are truly good among all the kitsch.
Then one painter suddenly gets world-famous after his death, and eight of his "worthless" paintings he had are suddenly worth millions. Then his boss demands that he hands over the paintings again, accusing him of stealing from the municipality.
This is the start of the film. I highly recommend it, even it's not really about this but it's a really good character study.
Scouting and recognizing potential in people from a young age is so underrated. If only companies did that more. They do it in sports because timing matters to extract value (your peak years as an athlete are as a young adult). I try to hire for apptitude and potential, not pedigree, and it has always payed off.
great thread. in success stories like these I find they often skip the long hard slog of the 0 to 1 phase. how exactly did the guy attract comedians to perform in this unknown basement? what were the low points and how did he keep going? that's where most people fail and give up.
In tweet format this is deeply unreadable. How does anyone (without involving yet another app or site to aggregate the tweets) deal with this? I couldn’t even make it past the second tweet in the sequence, the reading experience is just too miserable.
To be clear, I'm not being anti-semitic. Jon Stewart, to me, is emblematic of everything wrong with liberal politics in the United States. He spent 8 years dunking on George W and Republicans for being "stupid" while they consolidated power. He had a massive platform to mobilize liberals and instead they all made jokes about how uncultured Republicans were, while the Republican Party played a ground game that let them redistrict and take control of courts at every level to establish minority rule over the country.
Bill Maher - I don't follow him as closely, but everything I hear is basically regurgitated reactionary schtick. He says "the things they don't want you to say" which really means punching down at fat people, queers, people of color, etc. He's a relic of the early 2000s when you could attract a sizeable audience just by being a substance-less edgelord. As far as I know he's basically done a 180 politically because liberals used to enjoy that stuff but now it's more popular with right wingers.
The person in the article also discovered Ray Romano, so... he's 3/3 in my book.
John Liebowitz wasn’t a political organizer. He was a mediocre comedian paid to tell low-info people how to think (and vote).
I’m also astonished at how liberals, with full financial support of the world’s wealthiest people (you could count notable exceptions on your hands), censorship authority over every digital and print media, control over education curricula, union bosses, the FBI, and more have the ability to believe that they’re victims of some right wing conspiracy. It’s not just wrong; it’s the opposite of the truth. The US is still distinguishable from North Korea, so clearly there must be skullduggery afoot! BIG OIL must have done this! It can’t possibly be that most regular people think my pseudo-religion is dumb.
