Robert's profiling Paul Graham (along with a dozen or so other people) in his next book.
You can click through to read more, but the highlight for me was: "So, Paul Graham, what I liked about him was he’s always been a complete non-conformist and has gotten away with it, not because his parents had money or he was privileged, but because he didn’t care and he took risks and he just followed what he wanted to do. And that’s sort of the end of this book. That’s like the ultimate thing."
In the book that I'm writing now, I can talk about it later, if you'd like, I'm interviewing eight of the most eminent people in the world today in different fields -- In neuroscience, in architecture, in music. All of them are inherently non-conformists. All of them are inherently bucking the trend and taking their field in a completely novel direction by bringing out more of that uniqueness that I was talking about."
"In the book that I'm writing now, I can talk about it later, if you'd like, I'm interviewing eight of the most eminent people in the world today in different fields -- In neuroscience, in architecture, in music. All of them are inherently non-conformists. All of them are inherently bucking the trend and taking their field in a completely novel direction by bringing out more of that uniqueness that I was talking about."
i.e. Innovation in funding and development of startups. (I would guess)
I'm quite sad how everything is so short term nowadays.
But there are two key points I'd like out:
1. I have only seen nowadays, 2. I have met (maybe most?) really smart, able and ambitious people who tend to get little but important details wrong. They view power struggle as zero sum game. They fail to see that to make it you need not only look after your own best interest but of those people around you also. That top is not a singular point, but it is an area of larger structure - a pyramid if you will. And to get to the top of a pyramid you need a strong fundament and if you want to stay at the top you absolutely must hone and take care of your wider base.
Nowadays it's way easier to check the validity of your strategy. It is easier to check historical references for similar contexts as ones own. And these smart people just decide that they will replay the history. And this is the ultimate risk in my opinion - repeating same thing over and over (definition of insanity by Einstein I believe?) and expecting different results. While believing that alternative strategies that are counterintuitive at first are too risky.