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Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

> Einstein was an assistant patent examiner. Wittgenstein was a gardener at a monastery and then a primary school teacher.

I take your point, but Einstein and Wittgentsein are not good examples. You list jobs they held, but those jobs don't reasonably express the success either man had in his lifetime. Einstein was also a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies from 1933 to 1955 (when he died)[1]. Wittgenstein was also awarded a PhD at Cambridge - without having done coursework or exams - on the basis of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and was an idolized professor for many years there[2].

Neither man was by any stretch of the imagination an unrecognized genius - they were both absolutely recognized as huge intellects with superior achievements in their respective fields when they were alive.

[1] http://www.ias.edu/people/einstein/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#1929.E2.80....

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My point was the OP appeared to be judging by the jobs an individual held at one point in time. Judged by the same criteria, Einstein, Wittgenstein, and Kafka would have fared no better.

The fact that Einstein and Wittgenstein held more prestigious positions at other points in their lives would not have spared them from an attitude like the OP demonstrated at the time they held the more menial jobs, and judging only by those menial jobs.

Who knows what heights of glory this particular Target employee will climb to in the future? History is even more full of people who once held menial jobs but then went on to achieve vast fame and fortune (and perhaps even be judged a "genius" by many).

We also don't know what this particular Target employee did before he worked at target and taught LSAT courses. Perhaps, like Wittgenstein, he'd been a lecturer at Cambridge and was awarded some prestigious degree.

Ok, I know that's stretching credibility. He probably wasn't. But my point is that we don't know his past or his future. All we know are two job titles and his boast of being a genius. Should we judge him based on just those couple of facts? Or should we withhold judgment? My vote is for the latter.

Finally, I never claimed that Einstein or Wittgenstein weren't recognized during their lifetimes, just that Kafka and Van Gogh weren't, and that many others who are generally considered "geniuses" now weren't either.

Your original post sounded very different from what you're saying now, but I apologize if I misunderstood you. Your last two paragraphs talk about whole lives and what the world recognizes without in any way distinguishing between the examples you gave initially. Kafka, Einstein and Wittgenstein are all listed in the same paragraph; again, there's no distinction between them there.

I'm not trying to nitpick, just to say that I doubt I was the only person who took the post differently than it sounds now like you meant it.

They were listed in the same paragraph because they were examples of people who are widely considered to be "geniuses", but who either held menial jobs at one point in their life, or who weren't "successful" (in the common sense of the term) at one point in their life (in Van Gogh's and Kafka's case it was at all during their life, in Einstein's and Wittgenstein's case, during significant portions of their lives, though Einstein was certainly vastly more successful than any of the others during his lifetime).

The OP was talking about one point in the Target employee's life, the point at which he was a Target employee and an LSAT teacher, and he seemed to be judging solely based on job titles. That's a very myopic, and I would contend, unfair vantage point from which to judge a person's life, contribution to humanity, or achievements... as the examples I mentioned (and many others that I didn't mention specifically) demonstrate.

Please look again at your original post. This whole business about "at one point in their life" simply isn't there. You didn't say those words. Just the opposite: in one of the later paragraphs, you talk about people "who lived and died in dire poverty". You seem to be moving the goalposts of the argument. Either that or your first post was very unclear.

> in Einstein's and Wittgenstein's case, during significant portions of their lives, though Einstein was certainly vastly more successful than any of the others during his lifetime

No, see, you're doing it again. Wittgenstein was regarded from early in his life as a genius. He was considered a very eccentric genius (that's putting it mildly), but in his own lifetime he was successful and well regarded. If anything, he held lower status jobs because he chose to run away from the world of fame and regard that he already had.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#Teaching_po...

You guys are both right. The point really is that prior to hitting a career grand slam (a Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies") one can find oneself in a menial job where one is looked upon as an unfulfilled genius. There's nothing to say that this Target employee isn't writing the next great American novel in his spare time.

In summary, the "menial" job in and of itself should not be seen as a failing for the genius.

Also most people even though hit a career grand never get recognized for it.

Gandhi never won the Nobel prize for peace, Just imagine- Gandhi!!! Although there is hardly anyone in the past century who did explicitly more for peace than he did. He not just preached, but demonstrated an entire moment for independence of India and even succeeded all on non violence.

Not that he complained about it. But the world never recognized it at the time.

I thought the point was that one can find oneself in a menial job where one is not looked upon as anything other than a bozo. Before the grand slam, nobody is going to recognize you as any kind of genius. Probably agreeing with you, but wasn't sure about the wording.

"You're a loser until you're a winner."

Come on, being unclear is not the same as moving the goalposts. Unless you think gnosis is lying about what they meant.

"Who knows what heights of glory this particular Target employee will climb to in the future?"

Quite possibly none. Intelligence doesn't equal success, ever.

We all have plenty of examples of people who, though very smart, fared poorly in the world and then later, in their own lives or afterwards, fared much better and even became famous---because those people became famous.

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