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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

Good friend of mine was finalist around the early '90s. He know has a totally simple 'senior dev' job at one of the big SV company's service centre. One of the things that keep reminding me that success depends on so many things, hard math skills are one of them.

Unfortunately, I'm a guy with a very bad impostor sindrome, and a) whenever I see guys like him in worse/intellectually less challeging jobs than me I think I must be just lucky b) whenever I see guys like him I think I must be useless. :)

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Does he consider himself a failure? Some percentage of very intelligent people just don't care about "success". They have rich inner lives and hobbies and interesting friends, if they can find some. It could be that he's found a job that doesn’t cause him much stress, that he excels at compared to his colleagues, and allows him to pay for the pleasures of being alive. Much of pure math is the pursuit of difficult problems that may or may not be of any use to anyone. You ever hear this line: "Winning the Fields medal tells you two things about a person, that they were capable of achieving great things and that they didn't."

It's not clear to me that he would have contributed more to the world had he become some high-status academic.

Different goals lead to different outcomes, regardless of innate ability.

One always has to look at the whole person to understand whether he performs relatively well or not. The guy I was talking about is extremely risk averse. That makes steep careers quite difficult. But all in all, he's probably a happy person. Another example: MENSA says I'm way inside the top 1% when it comes to IQ tests (I didn't want to say 'intelligence'). I don't think I'm in the top 1% most successful people in my current environment, but that's all right as I'm coming from a poor village from a postcommunist country, and everything that comes with it (lack of good education, etc.). So compared to that, I'm doing all right, but naturally it's very difficult to catch up with people who could go to Stanford or Oxford. Not because it's difficult to learn the 'hard science stuff' -- I interviewed many Oxbridge guys and they're not that better than the others when it comes to hard tech/science knowledge. However, they're much better in social skills, self-confidence, usually have better network, family connections, etc. And those things matter a lot.

And I'm a big believer of luck and randomness. Since I've got a kid I wonder how do we even survive, life is so risky, starting from the birth itself.

Anyway, I think perspective gives you more happiness. At least it did for me.

> And I'm a big believer of luck and randomness.

Indeed. Like, for example, being born with a high IQ?

Yes, absolutely. Brains, geolocation, family, this is all just blind luck.

>You ever hear this line: "Winning the Fields medal tells you two things about a person, that they were capable of achieving great things and that they didn't."

Would you mind explaining this a little bit more, please? I would imagine that significant or groundbreaking mathematical discoveries qualify as "great things" by someone's reckoning.

But not by the reckoning of whoever coined that phrase.

Most work in pure mathematics -- even outstandingly brilliant work done by outstandingly brilliant people -- is never useful outside pure mathematics. If you regard pure mathematics as very valuable in its own right, that's no problem. But if you care mostly about practical benefits, you might think that someone with the mental characteristics needed to win a Fields Medal would have done better to use that wonderful brain for something that benefits the world more.

(For my part, I'm glad that some people with wonderful brains use them to enrich pure mathematics, because I happen to love pure mathematics. But I think those more practically minded people have a point.)

>Most work in pure mathematics -- even outstandingly brilliant work done by outstandingly brilliant people -- is never useful outside pure mathematics.

Perhaps this is untrue on a timescale of decades or centuries.

Applications mine from pure math all the time. See this SO answer for a wide range of other fields' problems that were solved with pure math. I see things from cryptography, graphics, distributed computing, chemistry, ... http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/280530/can-you-provi...

The list is expansive if you care to look for it.

It's definitely true that there's a large quantity of pure mathematics that later turns out to be useful outside pure mathematics.

The question that's relevant here, though, is what fraction of pure mathematics is ever useful outside pure mathematics.

I think this would be difficult to measure. My guess: only a small fraction, but some of that turns out to be incredibly useful.

It's hard for me to understand the ratio of the relative body of work that turns out to be useful versus the relative body of work that hasn't seen application yet. Across all institutions, pure mathematics is an extremely small field; yet their papers have an (almost) infinite amount of time available to find an application.

Sometimes these people tire of being constantly intellectually stimulated, or they take a different view on life than the purist view of the pursuit of long term development of humanity through research.

Myself, while I was not an Olympian in Math or Physics (the US fields some very competitive teams full of people who had better resources than me), I consider myself accomplished for what I had & the environment I grew in. I ultimately abandoned academia, in part because of the uncertainty, difficult work, and because my caring for friends won out - attempting to become wealthy enough to support friends in their endeavors, and giving them the resources I never had mattered more to me. I am perfectly happy being a lead developer, mentoring people to success & building products that help people's lives. I have no regrets.

It should also be mentioned that being someone who is supremely accomplished in competitions does not mean that the person is the smartest - there may be others smarter than him/her, and just did not have the fortune of growing up in an environment that could best foster that intelligence. Many of the smartest realize this, and don't hang their hats on any particular competition achievement.

It could be that you're lucky or maybe you're just suffering from impostor syndrome.

Have you considered that he might be perfectly happy where he is as he can basically relax at his job as most of the tasks that come up , even the difficult ones must be a cakewalk for him.

Success has a very narrow definition these days.

Here's an interesting story : http://heuna.tumblr.com/post/2415073898/kim-ung-yong-a-child...

success doesn't come on its own, one needs to put some aimed effort into it, or rely on luck.

I can say exactly the same about me, sometimes feeling like the biggest idiot around, with serious brain damage (really, not joking). But then I realize that I managed when working 100% to increase my paycheck 20x compared to my first Java 100% job right after school, doing roughly same job (it's a long story). Many kids being brighter than me, they now have "meh" jobs at best. For success, initial talent is just one of many properties.

Anyway, what we should strive for is happiness, with oneself, with job, people and world around us. Rest are just details.

Could you share how you did it ?

I increased my paycheck by >3 times in the last five years. I can't talk about saiya-jin's 20x, but I assume it's partly to do with starting on a stupidly low salary in the first place, and then going to something above average.

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