Talent

Quantity has a quality of its very own. Some writers are good - and they write all the time. The holy trinity of newsletter writers (Matt Levine, Byrne Hobart and Patrick McKenzie) write up to 700k words a year - so 2,000 words a day. I think Matt Levine’s schedule looks a little bit like waking up and doing 4000 words early in the morning about three times a week, then hitting send on his newsletter. Marc Rubinstein (another pretty prolific writer!) recently shared this Bloomberg profile of Jason Goldberg - “a Barclays analyst who has been writing a daily briefing note for 20 years”. It’s not just newsletter writers - for instance, Philip Kerr managed to write 42 books in 29 years by just working obsessively, writing on birthdays and Christmas. Paul Erdös had an even more insane work schedule: “Erdös first did mathematics at the age of three, but for the last twenty-five years of his life, since the death of his mother, he put in nineteen-hour days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso, and caffeine tablets. "A mathematician," Erdös was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." When friends urged him to slow down, he always had the same response: "There'll be plenty of time to rest in the grave." Erdös would let nothing stand in the way of mathematical progress. When the name of a colleague in California came up at breakfast in New Jersey, Erdös remembered a mathematical result he wanted to share with him. He headed toward the phone and started to dial. His host interrupted him, pointing out that it was 5:00 A.M. on the West Coast. "Good," Erdös said, "that means he'll be home." … Like all of Erdös's friends, Graham was concerned about his drug-taking. In 1979, Graham bet Erdös $500 that he couldn't stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdös accepted the challenge, and went cold turkey for thirty days. After Graham paid up--and wrote the $500 off as a business expense--Erdös said, "You've showed me I'm not an addict. But I didn't get any work done. I'd get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You've set mathematics back a month." He promptly resumed taking pills, and mathematics was the better for it. Looking at these guys, one feels a bit inadequate. How do they do it? Why aren’t you doing it? What did you get done this week? One answer to this question is Scott Alexander’s essay is The Parable of the Talents. In the essay, he’s basically trying to square a circle: to reconcile the ideas that 1. natural talent exists and 2. everyone is morally equivalent. Alexander puts a lot of effort into proving point 1, and I think he does a great job. Here are the relevant sections. I agree with all of this, which is why I’m not trying to put it into my own words. But I’m particularly interested in his point that talent is a real thing, and some people are just better at things than others. He takes this really seriously. “Consider for a moment Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. He grew up in poverty in a one-room house in small-town India. He taught himself mathematics by borrowing books from local college students and working through the problems on his own until he reached the end of the solveable ones and had nowhere else to go but inventing ways to solve the unsolveable ones. There are a lot of poor people in the United States today whose life circumstances prevented their parents from reading books to them as a child, prevented them from getting into the best schools, prevented them from attending college, et cetera. And pretty much all of those people still got more educational opportunities than Ramanujan did. And from there we can go in one of two directions. First, we can say that a lot of intelligence is innate, that Ramanujan was a genius, and that we mortals cannot be expected to replicate his accomplishments. Or second, we can say those poor people are just not trying hard enough. … In high school English, I got A++s in all my classes, Principal’s Gold Medals, 100%s on tests, first prize in various state-wide essay contests, etc. In Math, I just barely by the skin of my teeth scraped together a pass in Calculus with a C-. Every time I won some kind of prize in English my parents would praise me and say I was good and should feel good. My teachers would hold me up as an example and say other kids should try to be more like me. Meanwhile, when I would bring home a report card with a C- in math, my parents would have concerned faces and tell me they were disappointed and I wasn’t living up to my potential and I needed to work harder et cetera. And I don’t know which part bothered me more. Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust. On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.” And without some notion of innate ability, I don’t know what to do with this experience. I don’t want to have to accept the blame for being a lazy person who just didn’t try hard enough in Math. But I really don’t want to have to accept the credit for being a virtuous and studious English student who worked harder than his peers. … When I was 6 and my brother was 4, our mom decided that as an Overachieving Jewish Mother she was contractually obligated to make both of us learn to play piano. She enrolled me in a Yamaha introductory piano class, and my younger brother in a Yamaha ‘cute little kids bang on the keyboard’ class. A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now with me in my Introductory Piano class. A little while later, I noticed that my brother was now by far the best student in my Introductory Piano Class, even though he had just started and was two or three years younger than anyone else there. A little while later, Yamaha USA flew him to Japan to show him off before the Yamaha corporate honchos there. Well, one thing led to another, and my brother won several international piano competitions, got a professorship in music at age 25, and now routinely gets news articles written about him calling him “among the top musicians of his generation”. Meanwhile, I was always a mediocre student at Yamaha. When the time came to try an instrument in elementary school, I went with the violin to see if maybe I’d find it more to my tastes than the piano. I was quickly sorted into the remedial class because I couldn’t figure out how to make my instrument stop sounding like a wounded cat. After a year or so of this, I decided to switch to fulfilling my music requirement through a choir, and everyone who’d had to listen to me breathed a sigh of relief. Every so often I wonder if somewhere deep inside me there is the potential to be “among the top musicians of my generation.” I try to recollect whether my brother practiced harder than I did. My memories are hazy, but I don’t think he practiced much harder until well after his career as a child prodigy had taken off. … I dunno. But I don’t think of myself as working hard at any of the things I am good at, in the sense of “exerting vast willpower to force myself kicking and screaming to do them”. It’s possible I do work hard, and that an outside observer would accuse me of eliding how hard I work, but it’s not a conscious elision and I don’t feel that way from the inside. … But I still feel like there’s something going on here where the solution to me being bad at math and piano isn’t just “sweat blood and push through your brain’s aversion to these subjects until you make it stick”. When I read biographies of Ramanujan and other famous mathematicians, there’s no sense that they ever had to do that with math. When I talk to my brother, I never get a sense that he had to do that with piano. And if I am good enough at writing to qualify to have an opinion on being good at things, then I don’t feel like I ever went through that process myself. So this too is part of my deal with myself. I’ll try to do my best at things, but if there’s something I really hate, something where I have to go uphill every step of the way, then it’s okay to admit mediocrity. I won’t beat myself up for not forcing myself kicking and screaming to practice piano. And in return I won’t become too cocky about practicing writing a lot.” Here’s a related piece - his Apologia pro vita sua. “I have had a really busy few months. I think it will be letting up soon, but I’m not sure. And I’ve told a lot of people who needed things from me, for one reason or another, “I’m sorry, I’m too busy to take care of this right now.” And I worry that some of those people read my blog and think “Wait, if you have enough time to write blog posts nearly every day, some of which are up to six thousand words long, why don’t you have enough time to do a couple of hours work for me?” And the answer is – you fancy doctors with your mathematics and subtraction might say that I could just take a couple of hours away from blogging and use those free hours to write that one thing or analyze that one study or whatever, but you’re not going to fool me. Just as drugs mysteriously find their own non-fungible money, enjoyable activities mysteriously find their own non-fungible time. If I had to explain it, I’d say the resource bottleneck isn’t time but energy/willpower, and that these look similar because working hard saps energy/willpower and relaxing for a while restores it, so when I have less time I also have less energy/willpower. But some things don’t require energy/willpower and so are essentially free. Writing this is my addiction, so it’s free. Doesn’t mean anything else is.” Erdös’s genius, then, was that his 19 hour workdays were “essentially free”. He didn’t sweat blood and push though his brain’s aversion to doing maths - it must have come pretty naturally to him. So it’s really important to do things that come naturally to you. Here’s Jim Donovan talking about his SLA with clients while working as an investment banker: “When I started at Goldman Sachs … I would say to clients, you can leave me a voicemail, any time, unless I’m dead or asleep, I check it every ten seconds… And I don’t sleep very long either.” I suspect that for Donovan, this didn’t feel like sweating blood - it was just how he was wired. Some people (not me!) are slow repliers, some people hate always being available, and those people are going to be terrible investment bankers and Jim Donovan is going to take their clients. Because for him, this stuff came naturally. He’s a 99.999th percentile voicemail replier. He was born to do it - and what’s awesome is that he found a way to turn his natural talent into loads of money.