1. effort, usually from youth, that nobody knows about so it appears to be innate
2. the effort is motivated and guided by some mentor(s), usually people with serious qualifications, like your Fields medalist uncle deciding to take you under his wing, after you said "math is fun :D" one time at 7 years old when he told you his job was "to do math :)" upon you asking him as children like to do, and turn you into a Fields-winning adult
This reminds me of those people who pretend they're a genius because they can guess the day of the week if you give them a date, when the reality is that anybody can learn to do that because it's just an algorithm[1] that you can calculate in your head and practice to the point that you come off as if you have a photographic memory or something.
I think we overvalue the uniqueness of the individual in this hero worship of the lonely genius, as if a flower is independent of the earth from which it grows.
But then again, it's true that there are exceptional stars, singular phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of its parts. I suppose that leap, the surprising distance between what was given and what the individual made of it, is what we call genius, talent, luck or hard work.
We can see common evidence of this in how every person we know differs in their general abilities across different problem areas.
But we are so used to that we are probably under aware of how differently we may all think.
Potential geniuses would be people whose internal abstractions are uncommon and happen to fit important under-solved problem areas.
If their uncommon insights are paired with healthy brain biology, a drive to identify and solve interesting problems, and some luck, we get a genius.
It's more obvious in athletics, where there is clearly natural talent, but the equalizer is the support network of parents funding practice, driving to games, getting into competitive leagues, etc. I don't see why the same wouldn't apply to intellectual talents as well, even if the differences in natural talent are less obvious than in athletics.
> Soon after finishing college, I had the good fortune to meet Professor Heisuke Hironaka
[1] https://www.mathunion.org/fileadmin/IMU/Prizes/Fields/2022/H...
Although I don’t think a field medalist would waste his time with an untalented youth. He obviously saw something.
Ugh. Do you think a Fields medalist would "waste" his time cleaning his bedroom? Folding his clothes?
1. The world is much more menial than you think it is.
2. Fields medalists are, unsurprisingly, human beings, and keep doing human stuff like making new friends just for fun.
3. Not everyone is living under the weird delusion/obsession where all outcomes have to be maximally favorable for "life to be worth it". Not all companies have to be billion dollar companies. Not all students have to go and win Fields medals.
4. The "untalented youth" is much more interesting than what you give them credit for.
"Formal education" is just industrialized mentoring and compelled hard work. Dropouts and "uneducated" people built the world. If you work hard and have good mentors, you can do anything, whether it's in a school or not.
(While I am vehemently opposed to the modern method of education, I don't think that formal education in a classroom setting is inherently bad, nor do I think most people today have the social support, intellect, or temperament necessary to drop out and still be successful.)
There's a lot of liberties taken by the pseudo biographical articles, especially when they're dealing with the gee whiz genius trope in American media which is really annoying.
It's really just anti-intellectualisn cloaked to something else.