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Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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."

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.

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

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