May 2021Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinarysocial situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the starquarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physicssymposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water.But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the factthat when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary socialsituations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as arule extremely competitive — more competitive, I'd say, than highlycompetitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partlyperhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distancethemselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in thekinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justifiedin taking the results personally.Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident, especiallywhen young. It might seem like it would be a disadvantage to bemistaken about one's abilities, but empirically it isn't. Up to apoint, confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy.Another quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence. Notall nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at leastmoderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the confidenceto be fierce.[1]There's also a natural connection between nerdiness andindependent-mindedness. It's hard to be independent-minded withoutbeing somewhat socially awkward, because conventional beliefs areso often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one who was bothindependent-minded and ambitious would want to waste the effort ittakes to fit in. And the independent-mindedness of the fierce nerdswill obviously be of the aggressive rather than the passive type:they'll be annoyed by rules, rather than dreamily unaware of them.I'm less sure why fierce nerds are impatient, but most seem to be.You notice it first in conversation, where they tend to interruptyou. This is merely annoying, but in the more promising fierce nerdsit's connected to a deeper impatience about solving problems. Perhapsthe competitiveness and impatience of fierce nerds are not separate qualities, but two manifestations of a single underlying drivenness.When you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities, theresult is quite formidable. The most vivid example of fierce nerdsin action may be James Watson's The Double Helix. The first sentenceof the book is "I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood,"and the portrait he goes on to paint of Crick is the quintessentialfierce nerd: brilliant, socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded,overconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of himself.Indeed, his lack of social awareness makes both portraits that muchmore realistic, because he baldly states all sorts of opinions andmotivations that a smoother person would conceal. And moreover it'sclear from the story that Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness wasintegral to their success. Their independent-mindedness caused themto consider approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidenceallowed them to work on problems they only half understood (theywere literally described as "clowns" by one eminent insider), andtheir impatience and competitiveness got them to the answer aheadof two other groups that would otherwise have found it within thenext year, if not the next several months.[2]The idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one notjust to many normal people but even to some young nerds. Especiallyearly on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary socialsituations and so little doing real work that they get a lot moreevidence of their awkwardness than their power. So there will besome who read this description of the fierce nerd and realize "Hmm,that's me." And it is to you, young fierce nerd, that I now turn.I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is thatyour fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems.And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems thatnerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the numberof things you can win at by getting the right answer increases.Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest peoplein America are now fierce nerds.Indeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in businessthan in nerds' original territory of scholarship. Fierceness seemsoptional there. Darwin for example doesn't seem to have beenespecially fierce. Whereas it's impossible to be the CEO of a companyover a certain size without being fierce, so now that nerds can winat business, fierce nerds will increasingly monopolize the reallybig successes.The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness willturn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual playgroundbully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the hater, the shooterdown of new ideas.How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If yousucceed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that neutralizesbitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded to feel this;merely working on hard projects gives most fierce nerds somefeeling of satisfaction. And those it doesn't, it at least keepsbusy.[3]Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness, bydevoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or something likethat. Maybe that's the right answer for some people. I have no idea.But it doesn't seem the optimal solution to me. If you're given asharp knife, it seems to me better to use it than to blunt its edgeto avoid cutting yourself.If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind behindyou. There has never been a better time to be a nerd. In the pastcentury we've seen a continuous transfer of power from dealmakersto technicians — from the charismatic to the competent — and Idon't see anything on the horizon that will end it. At least nottill the nerds end it themselves by bringing about the singularity.Notes[1]To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are twodistinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyoneelse, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerdsare the latter type.[2]The same qualities that make fierce nerds so effective canalso make them very annoying. Fierce nerds would do well to rememberthis, and (a) try to keep a lid on it, and (b) seek out organizationsand types of work where getting the right answer matters more thanpreserving social harmony. In practice that means small groupsworking on hard problems. Which fortunately is the most fun kindof environment anyway.[3]If success neutralizes bitterness, why are there some peoplewho are at least moderately successful and yet still quite bitter?Because people's potential bitterness varies depending on hownaturally bitter their personality is, and how ambitious they are:someone who's naturally very bitter will still have a lot left aftersuccess neutralizes some of it, and someone who's very ambitiouswill need proportionally more success to satisfy that ambition.So the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally bitterand extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately successful.Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison, JessicaLivingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
