I’d rather do the thing than talk about it. Or, frankly, watch/listen/read others.
I suspect that combinations like that, are, indeed, as rare as hen's teeth.
Many great talents probably couldn't be arsed to play the rat race game, and keep their domain humble, or they piss off other people so much, that they never get a break.
In my time, I've worked with some top-shelf folks, who had many -but not enough- of the combination, to be mildly successful.
Most of the best were extremely ... er ... confident. Some, it came across as rudeness, but others, would politely accept your counsel, and then instantly feed it to the shredder, without you ever knowing.
I preferred the rude ones.
Seeking social cues to describe greatness is exactly what the grift preys on.
the last anecdote is a true story. one of the original owners of Alinea (Chicago) did just that and the guy who developed the site is quite literally set for life if he doesn't do anything else but also has this incredible in within the fine dining world now.
it is a perfect example of what it does without any deference to other design languages. instead of po-mo symbolism, it really is just the sufficient metal and glass to do the thing. an essential truck is unsentimental working capital. its not a duck, its an undecorated shed.
i think the design will age very well because there's nothing to add to it.
if I'm understanding correctly the implications of Emily Noether's work, its an absolute travesty that she isn't famous in the same breath as Einstein and Feynman. Yet this video was the first time I had even heard of her.
I think a parallel would be if some random guy, outside of academia, completely and cleanly solved the dark energy/matter mystery in his spare time, with a revolutionary way of thinking, and it completely reshaped our understanding of not only the cosmos but of physics itself.
Becoming well known for advanced works in science requires a once in many centuries type level of achievement - which is what Einstein was. Feynman is a great example of this. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of all time and made many important contributions to science, yet he would probably be relatively unknown if not for his excessive public outreach and his exceptional ability to explain complex concepts in an extremely intuitive and clear fashion. A talent which he put to extensive use.
Einstein was just not a random person doing something, it was an academically trained person, still in contact with people from academia, with extreme talent and found himself in a situation with a lot more free time and in an environment that was promoting his thinking. Mind you it does not take anything away from the achievements because the overall work was astounding, but it is disingenuous to present him as "a random outside of academia".
Noether was just not correctly widely recognized outside of the field, as much as she should have been at the time, because, let's face it, she was a woman. Her achievements are on par with Einstein's in term of scope and range. Noether's theorem alone is a huge cornerstone of modern physics and guiding the design of Quantum Field Theory and pinning symmetries as the way to tackle the building of physical Lagrangians that lead to the expression of the current standard model.
Her work on algebra is so massive, it is hard to wrap your head around it, the contributions especially to rings and topology are to be mentioned. She has shaped so many parts of mathematics that it boggles the mind and her achievements are well within the once in a several centuries type of scope.
I will not try to compare people because it is pointless because circumstances and "importance of achievements" is a difficult to measure metric, especially for people working outside of the fields where those achievements have been made, but subtly painting Noether as not widely known because she has not achieved "once in many centuries type level of achievement" or that she was not great at communicating, is blatantly false, because she has, in fact, several times over done both of those things.
She was known to be gentle and gracious and always there to offer help and or advice or explanations, sharing her knowledge, and wisdom. She is one of those model scientist that any scientist, regardless of gender or ethnicity, should look up to as a role model, and she embodies what most of us think that science could and should be.
Who got attention? People who spent 20% of their time making and 80% self-promoting.
The world is full of amazingly talented and hard working people. Almost all of them are not on social media.
Where X is any vocation, skill, talent, etc…
The book "Do the Work" explained it well: "The amateur tweets. The pro works." People who fit into the Shell Silverstein "I'm so good I don't have to brag" bucket aren't as visible because they're working, not talking about working.
Something fairly consistent I've observed: the popular people you see tweeting and on every podcast are likely not very good at what they're popular for.
Sometimes there's overlap, but it's the exception, not the rule.
Now I'm not much for salespeople in general, but I do understand their purpose.
I doubt there would be good money in creating this, but certainly it would create a lot of value and benefit many just from the fact that if we channel limited resources to those more likely to create better things, then we all benefit. I'd imagine that even a poorly defined metric would be an improvement upon the current one: visibility. I'm sure any new metric will also be hacked but we're grossly misaligned right now and so even a poorly aligned system could be better. The bar is just really low.
which shouldn't be a goal onto itself, unless you really want to get completely detached and insane like every other billionaire.
That's not a paradox. It's plain old fraud, or to put it mildly it's marketing and self-promoting. The self-help gurus that get paid are those who convinced people who see help to pay them instead of the next guy. What gets the foot in the door is not substance, but the illusion and promise of substance.
I still don't understand why I have such a strong reaction to the book. It feels like the message is "take care of your parents instead of just taking from them".
It isn't as much as "talking about working" but putting the bulk of their effort in self-promotion.
If you hire someone because they excelled at self-promotion, the reason you hired them is because they excelled at self-promotion. Not because they are great or even good, but because they are good at convincing the likes of you to hire the likes of them.
In business settings this sort of problem ends up being a vicious cycle. Anyone that hires a self-promoting scrub is motivated to make that decision look like a success as well, otherwise the scrub's failure will also be their own failure. If these scrubs output passable work instead of great or even good, that's something you as a manager can work with.
Changed an industry, made a lot of money, and pretty much nobody knows who I am (which I'm completely fine with). Not looking for fame, don't want it.
But the best live band I've ever seen was an almost completely unknown local band from Florida (that almost never played outside that state, as far as I'm aware).
I'm willing to believe that there's an even better band out there somewhere that's never even played outside of a garage.
There are people who are great at something not because they do novel work, but because they redo known work that's really hard.
Not everyone has the luxury of knowing where the frontier lies and working at it. Many, many people reinvent the wheel simply because they don't know that what they're trying has already been done. And they can redo the work in a great way.
Of course they'll never get credit for this.
Many great artists died in complete obscurity (eg van Gogh). Some have found their fame posthumously (eg van Gogh). I'm sure many who were even more ahead of their time remain in obscurity.
It's a kind of tragedy of the commons. Instead of our attention being taken up by creatives who are mostly competent, it is taken up by everyone who wants to short circuit the system. (This would be even more interesting if I could find that article that suggests our taste in music is actually created by exposure.)
There used to be editors of various sorts, whether it be in writing, art, or music, who would be the arbiters of taste. You could indeed take issue with who they decided to elevate, but they definitely provided a useful function.
snappr021•8h ago