あなたが人生と呼ぶすべて

Chander Ramesh p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

At first glance, this doesn’t seem to be true at all. Just google “top inventions of all time” and you come up with lists like this, where you immediately wonder, am I really smarter than the creator of the nuclear reactor? Could you really create a steam engine if you were teleported back in time? Let me give you 100 lifetimes, could you create penicillin from scratch? How about electricity? Maybe that was too hard, but surely you could at least create the vacuum tube? X-Rays?

So how on earth is it possible that these people that shaped reality were no smarter than me? At best, it’s false modesty; at worst, it’s delusion. I thought this way for quite a long time.

It’s undoubtedly true that some of these inventions were made by the incredibly intelligent individuals. How many of us could have invented the transformer architecture and kicked off an AI revolution? But the most important aspect is the ability to think with originality and separate one’s self from the herd.

Here’s Steve Job’s own hero, Edwin Land, holder of 535 patents and one of the preeminent scientists of his day:

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> Just as the great steps in scientific history are taken by the giants of the centuries when they slough off the tentacles of the group mind, so every significant step in each single field, is taken by some individual who has freed himself from a way of thinking that is held by friends and associates who may be more intelligent, better educated, better disciplined, but who have not mastered the art of the fresh, clean look at the old, old knowledge. By very definition things which we care about most — the important breakthroughs — do not occur spontaneously in multiple because they are the result of a very special way of seeing, by a very special mind.

It seems that, even among scientists, it is not the smartest or most educated that make the innovations, but the most original. The more educated one is, the more entrenched one becomes in the old ways of thinking. Perhaps that is why, so often, one must possess a certain degree of naivety to challenge the status quo.

It’s might be true that an innovation in nuclear engineering requires a higher IQ than an innovation in marketing, but the required IQ is likely much lower than you think. And that innovation likely won’t come from the smartest nuclear engineer, but rather the most original.

The tendency to assume something is so complex that it simply cannot be understood is a dangerous, self-deriding form of the mind-projection fallacy. In the classic case, you assume because you know something everyone else must, too. Here, the fallacy is inverted. Because you haven’t spent a decade in nuclear engineering, and thus cannot make smart comments about it, you assume those who can are simply geniuses. But what if you committed multiple decades of your life to that field? What if you let it consume you, the way others did? All of a sudden, might those breakthroughs that once seemed reserved only for Einstein and Oppenheimer might become accessible to you, too?

In other words, we mistake insights that were produced by having a certain context as having been the product of raw intelligence. Instead, focus on cultivating that originality and acquire context with work experience, talking to experts in the field, or simply experiencing a problem first-hand.

The more biographies I read, the more I see the truth behind this simple observation from Jobs. Changing the world, in even the simplest of ways, is both challenging and incredibly rewarding. You need to be arrogant enough to presume you can change the world, but not naive enough to assume it won’t push back. But if you do manage to contribute something lasting to what we collectively call life, you’ll be remembered in the annals of history forever. And that should be incredibly inspiring and exciting for all of us.

Unlike other blog posts, this is meant to be a living document that I edit whenever I find a new example. Hopefully the mountain of evidence convinces you. It certainly convinced me.

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> My tale is one of not being brilliant. I wasn’t even trained as an engineer or scientist. I did, however, have the bloody-mindedness not to follow convention, to challenge experts and to ignore Doubting Thomases. I am also someone who is prepared to slog through prototype after prototype searching for the breakthrough. If a slow starter like me could succeed, surely this might encourage others.”

—- James Dyson, in Against the Odds

Dyson wasn’t an engineer or a scientist, and he had ne