And I guess that's why Google et al. likes to hire PhDs. They can take all kinds of shit, and endure. Get to the bottom of those problems even in the face of internal politics/bureaucracy.
-- Thomas Edison
-- Louis Pasteur
-- Alexander Hamilton[0] http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/michael-pettis/pl...
There was a grain of talent and a moment of inspiration that led to a dogged pursuit of their interest.
People are quick to write it off as "oh, they had talent" or "oh they were a genius", but I'm reasonably confident given the number of amazing people I've met in this industry, everyone (well, everyone that's not an egotist) that's ever had this label attributed to them will attest: The talent comes from the countless hours of work, effort and frustration put into realizing that talent. It's only once we've overcome this effort and frustration and others think we make it look easy that they say "Oh, but you had talent"... sure, but I didn't have any to start with. Now after 10,000 hours of practice, of countless nights of going to bed frustrated that I couldn't understand something or make my fingers work right, of the number of times I played until my fingers and lips bled all in the pursuit of mastering whatever it is I'm trying to master. Only then does everyone see this talent. I don't see talent, all I see is the hard work to get where I am now and how far I still have left to go to consider myself part of the circle I still think are better or more accomplished than me. Any "talent" I may exhibit is the product of the pursuit of my interest.
My talent, my genius if you will is nothing more than this. I am not a genius. I am no more intelligent than has the capacity of any other that has the tenacity to stick with it through the basics and learn the fundamentals and go through the mental and physical pain that I have endured to get here.
Wouldn't you have to be a genius to be able to make such an evaluation?
How do you know if someone you met went to Harvard? They already told you.
Though, I would have given my right arm to go to MIT earlier in my life, just for access to MITs professors, forget the degree.
If you tried something and failed, how many permutations could you go through before you ran out of ideas of what to try? Could you do it for _years_? Could you keep trying, learning from your mistakes for a lifetime, until you reached your goal? Maybe you're a genius then.
All it takes is being able to look at things and wonder "how could I apply this along with what I already know to achieve that goal?" Eventually you'll have some permutation of ideas that work. Even if you put it down and come back to it many years later. Maybe the goal isn't obvious until one day all the ideas come together to solve a problem that you need solved right now that yesterday you'd never even had cause to think about. That doesn't negate the work you did learning those things.
"Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it's stupid." - Einstein
There's definitely a need for hard work in order to have success, but perhaps there's something necessary that has to be present for the hard work to build upon. Maybe that something is "genius".
This is BS, and the kind of BS that results in lazy entitled adults expecting the world to be their oyster because they have kept their dreamer curiosity intact.
Out of the people I've know who are internationally-recognized academics and/or world-class engineers, many are both hard working and creative. Probably the majority of them, in fact. But many more are hard working and not especially creative: they doggedly pursue single lines of inquiry or development, and possibilities for truly new ideas or techniques - not just refinements - are exposed through the intellectual equivalent of brute force.
I don't know any internationally-recognized academics or world-class engineers who are creative but not hard working.
This could easily be attributed to curiosity. Don't dismiss curiosity as something wishy-washy.
As I said before, the mindset between hardworking and curious is different. That's not to say pursuing curiosity takes no effort. I'll use a musician analogy to explain. A hardworking musician works hard to master their skill and knowledge with an instrument in order to maximise their abilities. A curious musician by contrast is guided by much broader principles, including a greater focus on sound rather than their personal skill. A playing mistake that produces an interesting result is not something to be eliminated by refinement, but instead is the opening of a new avenue of inquiry. It helps to be open to interesting mistakes, and this is not something that is easy to do when you're hyper focused on perfecting yourself.
In other words, spending energy is necessary to get a fuller understanding of something, but what motivates you does have an impact on the end result. Hard work is driven by ego, playful curiosity less so, but it doesn't mean less energy. Work and play are not the same thing, but what separates them is not the activity per se, but rather the mindset of the individual.
I have a sample size of one that says this is false. For me at least, hard work comes from one of a number of things, none of which are ego.
1. The desire to deliver what I set out to deliver by the deadline I promised. I made a promise and I was raised that a man is only as good as his word. So unless you have a compelling reason why delivery is not an option, you see it through.
2. The desire for the satisfaction of looking at something that will pay future dividends, like learning to grow my own food takes hard work now, but at the end of it, I have a garden full of "free" food. Edit: On reflection, this one may be the most likely candidate for being ego - the ability to stand back and say proudly "I did that"... I will concede, this is probably ego.
3. The desire to master something I haven't yet mastered that either satisfies my fascination or because understanding it will enhance or simplify my life in the future - like small engine repair. I could easily take it to a shop and have them do it, but I'd rather learn how to do it myself because down the road there may be no shop nearby or I may just have to make do and improvise. If I don't work hard and spend the time and effort to understand the fundamentals and principles that make it all work, I wouldn't stand a chance.
So hard work isn't always about ego. The hard work may be fueled by curiosity, or it may be fueled by necessity. Certainly curiosity makes the hard work seem more like play than work, but that doesn't make it any less work. It just means that you don't realize how much effort you're putting in and it really just feels like an amusing way of playing or wasting time, but it's still work.
Now not saying that's a bad thing! I have learned the hard way that we all have egos and that guided properly it's actually a benefit, as it drives you to do valuable things both for yourself _and_ others, as is clear in all of your points.
This is at the core of why we're disagreeing.
I'll make this as clear as I can. I have no problem with putting a lot of energy into something (or in your words, I have no problem with effort).
The reason we disagree is because for you effort = work, and for me the two are distinct. For me the worker mindset is one potential driving force behind putting in effort, and curiosity is another potential driving force behind putting in effort (there are others too; fear, anger, etc...).
The key point I've been trying to make is not about effort at all, but rather the difference between work and play. Whilst I do not deny that work has its place (as you indicated, it can lead to self-reliance, which is a good thing in my opinion), what I do think is that it lets ego get in the way of making things better.
Going back to a music analogy, let's imagine someone is creating a song. During the creation of the song, they discover a new sound that by chance fits the song perfectly. If the person wants this sound in their new song, they can either sample the existing sound, or learn how to create it from scratch. For someone with a 'hard work' mentality, the sampling option seems like cheating, in the sense of cheating yourself out of creating the song. However, if you're driven by curiosity/playfulness, your involvement in the creation of the song is of less importance, what matters more is the pleasure that comes from listening, and as the sound is identical to the one you wanted to hear there's no cheating of the listener.
Here's another analogy, the hacker vs. the academic. It's possible to become skilled with technology using either approach, but they are different approaches. The hacker lets curiosity guide their learning. The academic lets refinement of existing knowledge guide their learning. The academic appreciates best practices, the hacker looks for whatever works. You could make arguments both for and against both approaches, but IMO the hacker is more likely to be driven to explore, and enjoy doing so.
Hope I've clarified that my points have been about 'work vs. play' instead of 'effort vs. no effort'.
Saying hard work is ego driven while curiosity has some more noble, ineffable motivation is the exact same sort of BS I was decrying before. Hard work can just as well be driven by a sense of responsibility, a desire for more predictable outcomes, or faith, while curiosity/playfulness can be an ego-saving measure to offset mediocrity that the person can't or won't work past. Neither is more morally right, imo.
But to meander back to the core of the discussion, I don't think it's possible to become notably good at anything without at least some motivation towards self-improvement and foundational skills. People who ride playfulness and curiosity into lasting renown are able to do so because they have some degree of mastery of the fundamentals. Some people manage to earn lasting renown without much curiosity or playfulness, just a single-minded drive towards mastering known techniques.
Few to no people have ever earned lasting renown by noodling around in a field they had zero grounding in until they randomly struck gold. Some have earned infamy with that approach, but that's a different topic.
Anyone notable? I'd be interested to read about those... and if the striking of gold was truly random or if it was something else.
You could also say that many other people looked at the same thing and either didn't give a shit, or they weren't willing to continue suffering toward the payoff at some point.
Is that tenacity? Curiosity? Some of each?
I will concede that this may not always be the case. Of course, there are a thousand Salieris for every Mozart. But when you set out, you don't set out to become Salieri. When you play in an orchestra, you don't spend your life striving to play second fiddle and you certainly don't just get to sit down in the principal violin spot because you're a genius. You work for it, just like the guy who earned his right to be on that podium leading the orchestra.
For everything that's wrong with the movie Whiplash, there is a lot of nuance that it captures really well regarding the personalities in orchestras and what it really takes to get to the top of your game.
And if Mozart hadn't been there, at that time; would we not be speaking of Salieri as the genius? Perhaps.
Article says she was part of this study.
Music is a bit of a poor example for application to "genius" actually because just like a golf swing much of it is in the practice of your gross and fine motor skills and good technique, which as we all know, if you don't rigorously practice good habits, you may as well not bother practicing at all because you're actively going in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile, I've got friends that live on welfare and legitimately couldn't understand neural networks (or even algebra) if they spent their whole lives dedicated to it. They are still excellent people, but perhaps mathematics isn't their best subject.
The guy I have in mind is an incredible impressionist and comedian, I wish he had more confidence in his talents.
I have a friend who's smart, and is a really good listener. We have really good philosophical conversations, and he kicks my ass at board games. I've been wanting him to get into programming, because right now he's working as an assistant manager at a sandwich shop chain. He absolutely has the talent to understand programming, but he has never put an ounce of effort into it. He really likes the idea of making 50k/yr (which would essentially be a doubling of his salary) so he could be less depressed about finances.
I offer him help... I tell him how I self-trained into programming, without a C.S. degree. And he just has a total lack of effort, and I think that he just tells himself that he can't do it.
When we establish the narrative that the only barrier is hard work, then we ought to be able to motivate people because they'll recognize that most things are within their reach with enough determination.
I mean, imagine a world where I talked to my friend and was just like: "oh yeah. You're not smart enough. You never finished any bachelor degree. And I guess you could get into it anyway if you have been born into the upper class, but you weren't. There's no reason to try for anything better, you'll just fail." I'd be a pretty bad friend by modern standards.
trust me, you're not going to convince him.
he's probably going to just do nothing, for a long time, and tell you how lucky you are every time you visit.
I have a story of failure too. Two other frends expressed interest in learning to program, and I tried to teach them C while I was learning it myself. Big mistake. They quit after the first very intense and long lesson. I think I threw them in to the deep end of the pool, trying to teach them C as their first exposure to programming (when I myself didn't even know C and was learning along with them).
In the successful cases first mentioned above, both of my friends taught themselves languages they were interested in, at their own pace, and in their spare time (what little there was of it). They were also clearly very motivated, which my other two friends may not have been.
Moral of the story: I think it all depends on the student, the teacher, what they're trying to learn, how they're learning, how they're taught, and how motivated they are. You can't just generalize and say it'll work for everyone or not work for everyone.
The successes make me cautiously optimistic and I will personally try to help people again, if given the chance, despite there being no guarantee that it will work. In fact, I'd still try to help even every one of my previous attempts had failed.
I have remained optimistic, but yeah.. I do my best just to casually mention it to everyone that it's possible to get into, and that I'm always available as a resource.
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
It's very clearly both.
Most anyone in the business knows cases.
(of course that isn't necessarily true, but I find it amusing)
...until you know absolutely everything about absolutely nothing.
Don't do drugs, brush your teeth, get a good education, exercise regularly, shower regularly, spend less than you make, eat healthy. Do as your told.
MS = More s---
PhD = Piled higher and Deeper
OTOH, I bear neither.
When you find out you know nothing, you get your Masters
When you realize no one else knows either you get your PHD
Disclaimer: dropped out of a PhD program due to lack of interest and elbow-grease.
This does not prepare you well for most workplaces, except for maybe Google, who have enough resources to create an alternate reality for their engineers so they don't have to grow up.
Really? I did not find that to be the case. I don't mind deadlines, but watching the day-to-day life of academics doing academia with their peers is what caused me to drop out of a PhD program and go finish my research project on my own. After seeing it in action, I wanted no part of being one of them for the rest of my career. I expect that I could have been at a rarely political university system, but after some medium-ish number of conferences (i.e. more than two dozen), I doubt that it was much worse than average. I found the whole thing quite "icky". In fact, I found it worse than any commercial environment I've been in (although I've been told I've been lucky in my experiences for failing to find it to such a degree in commercial environments).
Edit:
Looks like it is still a while before my speech ban is up, so I'm pasting my response to kevingwang's response (below) here:
>To a particular degree, anyway. Convincing a University, or being published in peer-journal, for example.
>I think some are more or less ignored, though I guess I can't say that has no influence whatsoever and I'm also not sure that you can entirely avoid the influence of others.