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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry, but no matter how much you study math, practice the scales or study anatomy, you'll never be another Nash, Bach or DaVinci.

Hard work and resolve will get you far, and genius alone is no guarantee of success, but true genius isn't simply the application of enough hard work and resolve.You either win the genetic lottery or you don't.

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If you painted every day, and pushed yourself by painting diverse things that were beyond your abilities, you're going to get goddamned good at it.

Yes, and that will make you an expert, possibly even a master, but not a genius. Genius isn't skill or technical competence, it's potential. Ramanujan was a genius even without formal training. Van Gogh died a genius before anyone cared about his art. Einstein was a genius daydreaming in the patent office. Shakespeare was a genius when he was writing dirty jokes.

Genius certainly exists, but it is often confused with the application of years of directed effort.

From the outside you might not be able to see the difference, but perhaps inside the discipline you can see the difference.

Often one might think that results are the indicator. But I don't Crick and Watson were genii (prefer to sound of geniuses) just hard workers but when the payoff of their hard work came out you would probably be excused for thinking they possessed that special gift.

> Yes, and that will make you an expert, possibly even a master, but not a genius.

You say that like it's some sort of indictment. Being an expert, possibly even a master, sounds great.

It’s funny that you bring up Van Gogh, because he was as far from the archetypal genius as you can imagine. He started late, and he produced a lot of quite crappy paintings for many years before he produced his great works. And not least, he had a family that supported him so he didn’t have to waste his time with making a living.

It's really hard to say Ramanujan was a genius "without formal training." He didn't have the formal training of an English mathematician at Cambridge, but he had access to tutor and some material. He absolutely obsessed over what were essentially mathematical reference manuals for years in a way that was probably central to his extreme skill in symbol manipulation. It was a form of training that almost nobody would voluntarily expose themselves to.

It's a problem to say this because it's just a truism. Genius implies some sort of exceptional work; seeing what nobody thought to look for. People aren't geniuses. They produce genius. Von Neumann was clearly exceptional, but was he "a genius"? His output was exceptional. He planted seeds and definitely did not wait for ideal conditions. We may debate the legends of his cognitive abilities - eidetic memory - but he absolutely was a "workaholic". He never won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal, as if to imply his output was not of the quality of genius.

I must say that you picked a particularly poor example with which to make your point.

> I'm sorry, but no matter how much you study math, practice the scales or study anatomy, you'll never be another Nash, Bach or DaVinci.

But without doing that, you will never know.

In addition, many "geniuses" were never acknowledged in their own time. So, were they actually "geniuses"?

How can you be so confident in this opinion?

Don't you know? That's krapp the genius!

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