I recently started using a new strategy of curating a personal reading list via a long-living agent in Copilot, which serves somewhat like my professor or mentor, giving me a living reading list that I help re-orient as I pick up new interests, dislike its suggestions, or simply want to switch topics entirely out of nowhere.
Along the way, I also have been asking it for topics that are not just technical, but more philosophical and generally of interest.
I also separately have realized that I am way too lazy to read both technical and personal readings, but lately I have been a lot more interested in broadening my knowledge and topics of interest outside of purely professional reading. This week I finished the audio book for All the Shah's Men, a tragic but illuminating insight on the history of the relationship between the US, Britain, the Soviet Union and Iran, including the plights of the Iranian people under both the Shahs of past and present, the brief triumph and greatness of Mohammad Mosaddegh, and the evergreen penchant of outside nations to meddle in the politics of the long-standing and proud nation of Iran. I think it can only help in all facets of life to be more informed and willing to acknowledge your ignorance in history, and learn more to reduce the ignorance and be more informed of how things came to be the way they are.
With that being said, this week's reading list topics are here, and I chose to capture some of the more interesting quotes from the 2 Paul Graham essays, "How to Work Hard", and "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius", both recounting Paul's general opinions about the meaning of hard work, how talent and hard work contrast, and what it means to truly cultivate genius.
How to Work Hard
"The only way to find the limit is by crossing it. Cultivate a sensitivity to the quality of the work you're doing, and then you'll notice if it decreases because you're working too hard. Honesty is critical here, in both directions: you have to notice when you're being lazy, but also when you're working too hard. And if you think there's something admirable about working too hard, get that idea out of your head. You're not merely getting worse results, but getting them because you're showing off — if not to other people, then to yourself."
This is so true sometimes, there is a weird ego that can be felt when you think you're the only person that can solve a problem, or that you want to show you are up to snuff, but who really cares?
"I do make some amount of effort to focus on important topics. Many problems have a hard core at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming toward the center to the extent you can. Some days you may not be able to; some days you'll only be able to work on the easier, peripheral stuff. But you should always be aiming as close to the center as you can without stalling."
I definitely have had this experience at work with a lot of projects, where usually the last 20% of debugging and development or thought about vision with stakeholders are by far the hardest part of the work, but surrounding this is a littering of comment resolution, merge conflict fixes, variable name changes, and other "non-core" tasks that feel like time is being spent making progress but are somewhat inconsequential ultimately.
"The best test of whether it's worthwhile to work on something is whether you find it interesting. That may sound like a dangerously subjective measure, but it's probably the most accurate one you're going to get. You're the one working on the stuff. Who's in a better position than you to judge whether it's important, and what's a better predictor of its importance than whether it's interesting?"
This is a bit of an interesting take itself. I agree with the core point of testing whether to do things based on whether they interest you, but whether that is an indicator of the importance of the work is different, and it also depends on what important means. It definitely is important to you if you are interested in it, and maybe that's enough for it to be considered generally interesting? I guess so.
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
I think it really is exactly that, especially with Paul's point in the separate "Bus Ticket Theory of Genius", clamoring about the passion for which one can care about something "meaningless".
"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, but for its own sake."
But on the contrary, this is less the sign of a genius and more the sign of a passion for something of little meaning, which is no problem at all to be honest, but markedly different than passion for a topic of "meaning", at least in the sense of things being meaningful based on how they can impact the world outside of the person of interest, like his comparison of Ramanujan vs. these collectors.
"But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket collector. Series matter, and bus tickets don't."
So maybe bus ticket collectors aren't "geniuses" by Paul's words, but at least they show the ability to care about something deeply, and what else matters to the individual?
"But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters. For example, it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates. It's more promising if something you're interested in is difficult, especially if it's more difficult for other people than it is for you. And the obsessions of talented people are more likely to be promising. When talented people become interested in random things, they're not truly random."
I do tend to lean to these convictions as well, that the musings of naturally capable people tend to be of more gravity than the average person. It's the classic trope of the super talented kid that was never really doing well in school etc. until the day they found their calling and suddenly the wheels started spinning. I do think there is something to be said about the inverse relationship between talent and perseverance for the large majority of people, maybe it is the natural pragmatism or difference in approach to interest that grows in a very talented person vs. not, and also is why having talent and perseverance is so remarkable. It's definitely also why so many attempts are made to "save" talented people that are not succeeding in an area of importance e.g. smart kids who spend all day gaming rather than developing some skill or talent, because it's much like an incredibly athletic athlete lacking game IQ or work ethic, where it feels like the latter are more developable skills than the intrinsic former.
"Newton's case, at least, suggests that the risk/reward rule holds here. He's famous for one particular obsession of his that turned out to be unprecedentedly fruitful: using math to describe the world. But he had two other obsessions, alchemy and theology, that seem 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 more than compensated for the other two. But were the other two necessary, in the sense that he had to take big risks to make such big discoveries? I don't know."
Exactly my point earlier! Not that Newton wasn't doing difficult things other than physics and had to be "saved", but even for such a generationally bright mind, it wasn't clear and obvious what he should be doing till the apple smacked his skull. In fact, vision is the one thing that all people both smart and not will lack in ways, how can we know so clearly what does and doesn't matter? Sometimes it's not even the people that are intellectually curious or capable in an area that have the vision to see its potential, but rather the thinkers and visionaries who just have a pulse for where things are going.
"The other solution is to let yourself be interested in lots of different things. You don't decrease your upside if you switch between equally genuine interests based on which seems to be working so far. But there is a danger here too: if you work on too many different projects, you might not get deeply enough into any of them."
This is a double-edged sword that is by far my most ADHD-coded issue in developing myself and finding my area of interest. I always quickly get the nagging urge that I need to be diversifying my range of knowledge more, or that I should suddenly drop all that I am doing and switch to some hot topic around the corner, only to end up "wasting" cycles by boiling the whole ocean. Overall, I don't ever think learning anything is a waste but you definitely need momentum in whatever you are doing for enough time to make it stick.
"It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting, what would it be?"
My off-the-cuff answer for this right now would be to invest in understanding where intelligent agents can assist underserved and disabled communities. I think there is a swell of folks interested in the commercial application of agents, and not enough that consider how underserved communities, especially the disabled, could benefit from an intelligent interface that can grow beyond just what a live-in aide (which most cannot afford), or traditional accommodations can provide. How can we reconsider the means by which we can provide education for these people, or provide in-home support?
I really like this passage about how Paul pushes his kids to go deep into any random area of interest they define, rather than defaulting to always maintaining a broad knowledge, since he states, the latter will slowly develop over time and from schooling, but the joy of learning from the former isn't a feeling that is guaranteed without stoking.
"When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage them to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep. I don't do this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want them to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feel that about something I'm making them learn. It has to be something they'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 of learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better."
I think I had some issues with this myself growing up. I always went to very academically accomplished schools, but I always felt there was a constant drive of endless work and schooling broadly over so many subjects, and even in school at the time the computer science class felt boring to me. The only deep feelings I had were on my robotics team, tennis, and video games, all passions I had stoked deeply outside of school where I felt the joy of being deeply involved and learning. Since then I found a lot more joy in computer science from the many different rabbit holes and projects I worked on throughout college and post, and the feeling of finding a new stone unturned and diving into it.