November 2019Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural abilityand determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not aswell understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some groupof people, and I'm going to choose bus ticket collectors. Thereare people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, theyhave an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect.They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bustickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Becausewe don't care enough. What's the point of spending so much timethinking about old bus tickets?Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession:there is no point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested.They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, butfor its own sake.When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, yousee a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticketcollector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemedpointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most strikingfeatures of Darwin's book about his voyage on the Beagle is thesheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seemsinfinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out onhis slate what happens to series.It's a mistake to think they were "laying the groundwork" for thediscoveries they made later. There's too much intention in thatmetaphor. Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing itbecause they liked it.But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticketcollector. Series matter, and bus tickets don't.If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that mightbe it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than youmight think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy forability and a substitute for determination. Unless you havesufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting.And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't needas much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard whencuriosity is pulling you.An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extentanything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind,and if there's one thing an obsessed mind is, it's prepared.The disinterestedness of this kind of obsession is its most importantfeature. Not just because it's a filter for earnestness, but becauseit helps you discover new ideas.The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If theylooked promising, other people would already have explored them.How do the people who do great work discover these paths that othersoverlook? The popular story is that they simply have better vision:because they're so talented, they see paths that others miss. Butif you look at the way great discoveries are made, that's not whathappens. Darwin didn't pay closer attention to individual speciesthan other people because he saw that this would lead to greatdiscoveries, and they didn't. He was just really, really interestedin such things.Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. They didn'tdiscover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising,but because they couldn't help it. That's what allowed them tofollow paths that someone who was merely ambitious would haveignored.What rational person would decide that the way to write great novelswas to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvishlanguage, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwesternBritain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.The bus ticket theory is similar to Carlyle's famous definition ofgenius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. But there are twodifferences. The bus ticket theory makes it clear that the sourceof this infinite capacity for taking pains is not infinite diligence,as Carlyle seems to have meant, but the sort of infinite interestthat collectors have. It also adds an important qualification: aninfinite capacity for taking pains about something that matters.So what matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because noone can tell in advance which paths are promising that you candiscover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether anobsession might be one that matters. For example, it's more promisingif you're creating something, rather than just consuming somethingsomeone else creates. It's more promising if something you'reinterested in is difficult, especially if it's more difficult forother people than it is for you. And the obsessions of talentedpeople are more likely to be promising. When talented people becomeinterested in random things, they're not truly random.But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting ideathat's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do greatwork, you also have to waste a lot of time.In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If thatrule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly greatwork is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turnout to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.I'm not sure if this is true. On one hand, it seems surprisinglydifficult to waste your time so long as you're working hard onsomething interesting. So much of what you do ends up being useful.But on the other hand, the rule about the relationship between riskand reward is so powerful that it seems to hold wherever risk occurs.Newton's case, at least, suggests that the risk/reward rule holdshere. He's famous for one particular obsession of his that turnedout to be unprecedentedly fruitful: using math to describe theworld. But he had two other obsessions, alchemy and theology, thatseem to have been complete wastes of time. He ended up net ahead.His bet on what we now call physics paid off so well that it morethan compensated for the other two. But were the other two necessary,in the sense that he had to take big risks to make such bigdiscoveries? I don't know.Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets? Itprobably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, becausethese people don't become famous.It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard topredict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really goodtime to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin hadbeen born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard ofhim.What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution isto hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviouslypromising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as withany hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk. If youforgo working on what you like in order to follow some moreconventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderfulthat you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all thetime, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail.The other solution is to let yourself be interested in lots ofdifferent things. You don't decrease your upside if you switchbetween equally genuine interests based on which seems to be workingso far. But there is a danger here too: if you work on too manydifferent projects, you might not get deeply enough into any ofthem.One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it mayhelp explain why different types of people excel at different kindsof work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability.If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and naturalability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theoriesto explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actuallydo great work in various fields. But it may be that much of theskew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested indifferent things.The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely todo great work after they have children. Here interest has to competenot just with external obstacles, but with another interest, andone that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to findtime for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. Thereal change is that you don't want to.But the most exciting implication of the bus ticket theory is thatit suggests ways to encourage great work. If the recipe for geniusis simply natural ability plus hard work, all we can do is hope wehave a lot of ability, and work as hard as we can. But if interestis a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivatinginterest, to cultivate genius.For example, for the very ambitious, the bus ticket theory suggeststhat the way to do great work is to relax a little. Instead ofgritting your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peersagree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should trydoing something just for fun. And if you're stuck, that may be thevector along which to break out.I've always liked Hamming's famous double-barrelled question: whatare the most important problems in your field, and why aren't youworking on one of them? It's a great way to shake yourself up. Butit may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to askyourself: if you could take a year off to work on something thatprobably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting,what would it be?The bus ticket theory also suggests a way to avoid slowing down asyou get older. Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas asthey get older is not simply that they're losing their edge. It mayalso be because once you become established, you can no longer messabout with irresponsible side projects the way you could when youwere young and no one cared what you did.The solution to that is obvious: remain irresponsible. It will behard, though, because the apparently random projects you take upto stave off decline will read to outsiders as evidence of it. Andyou yourself won't know for sure that they're wrong. But it willat least be more fun to work on what you want.It may even be that we can cultivate a habit of intellectual busticket collecting in kids. The usual plan in education is to startwith a broad, shallow focus, then gradually become more specialized.But I've done the opposite with my kids. I know I can count on theirschool to handle the broad, shallow part, so I take them deep.When they get interested in something, however random, I encouragethem to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep. I don'tdo this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I wantthem to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feelthat about something I'm making them learn. It has to be somethingthey're interested in. I'm just following the path of least resistance;depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show them the joy oflearning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better.Will it have any effect? I have no idea. But that uncertainty maybe the most interesting point of all. There is so much more to learnabout how to do great work. As old as human civilization feels,it's really still very young if we haven't nailed something sobasic. It's exciting to think there are still discoveries to makeabout discovery. If that's the sort of thing you're interested in.Notes[1] There are other types of collecting that illustrate this pointbetter than bus tickets, but they're also more popular. It seemedjust as well to use an inferior example rather than offend morepeople by telling them their hobby doesn't matter.[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," sincesome people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyonewho expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such abasic word, so I figure they may as well start now.[3] Think how often genius must have been nipped in the bud bypeople being told, or telling themselves, to stop messing about andbe responsible. Ramanujan's mother was a huge enabler. Imagine ifshe hadn't been. Imagine if his parents had made him go out and geta job instead of sitting around at home doing math.On the other hand, anyone quoting the preceding paragraph to justifynot getting a job is probably mistaken.[4] 1709 Darwin is to time what the Milanese Leonardo is to space.[5] "An infinite capacity for taking pains" is a paraphrase of whatCarlyle wrote. What he wrote, in his History of Frederick the Great,was "... it is the fruit of 'genius' (which means transcendentcapacity of taking trouble, first of all)...." Since the paraphraseseems the name of the idea at this point, I kept it.Carlyle's History was published in 1858. In 1785 Hérault de Séchellesquoted Buffon as saying "Le génie n'est qu'une plus grande aptitudeà la patience." (Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.)[6] Trollope was establishing the system of postal routes. He himselfsensed the obsessiveness with which he pursued this goal. It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the country with rural letter-carriers.Even Newton occasionally sensed the degree of his obsessiveness.After computing pi to 15 digits, he wrote in a letter to a friend: I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time.Incidentally, Ramanujan was also a compulsive calculator. As Kanigelwrites in his excellent biography: One Ramanujan scholar, B. M. Wilson, later told how Ramanujan's research into number theory was often "preceded by a table of numerical results, carried usually to a length from which most of us would shrink."[7] Working to understand the natural world counts as creatingrather than consuming.Newton tripped over this distinction when he choseto work on theology. His beliefs did not allow him to see it, butchasing down paradoxes in nature is fruitful in a way that chasingdown paradoxes in sacred texts is not.[8] How much of people's propensity to become interested in a topicis inborn? My experience so far suggests the answer is: most ofit. Different kids get interested in different things, and it'shard to make a child interested in something they wouldn't otherwisebe. Not in a way that sticks. The most you can do on behalf of atopic is to make sure it gets a fair showing — to make it clear tothem, for example, that there's more to math than the dull drillsthey do in school. After that it's up to the child.Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, KevinLacker, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, LisaRandall, Zak Stone, and my 7 year old for reading drafts of this.
