GoKawiilMarch 9, 2026 • 6 min read
Every Sunday I go to a coffee shop in Japantown with my laptop to write. And I write! I have no trouble writing. The writing isn’t the problem. The problem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is definitely not good enough to publish.
This didn’t use to happen. A few years ago I used to publish all the time. I’d write something, feel pretty good about it, and then hit publish without a second thought. I knew nobody really cared about what I was writing, so it didn’t matter if it sucked. And honestly, a lot of what I wrote really did suck. But I published it anyway. And yet I’d somehow occasionally write a good post.
Fast forward to today: I have no trouble writing, but I've now developed this fear of hitting publish. I’m older and objectively a better writer, with supposedly better ideas. So where did things go wrong? Why’s it so much harder to share my ideas now?
1.
There’s this unfortunate pattern that happens when someone wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop doing great work. Richard Hamming talks about this in You and Your Research:
When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.
Before the Nobel Prize, nobody really cares who you are. But after the Nobel Prize, you're a Nobel Prize winner, and Nobel Prize winners are supposed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every paper, every talk at a conference is now being evaluated against the standard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is asking, “is this worthy of a Nobel laureate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So instead of trying and occasionally failing, they just... stop trying. The fear of making something bad is worse than producing nothing at all.¹
2.
Many good ideas come from young and unproven people. The Macintosh team’s average age was 21. Most researchers at Xerox PARC were under 30. Some of the best research work I’ve seen at OpenAI has come from surprisingly young people. I don’t think young people are smarter than old people. I don’t think they work that much harder either. It mostly just seems that nobody really expects much of young people, so they're free to follow their curiosity into weird, silly, and seemingly-bad-but-actually-good ideas. They're not afraid of looking stupid. Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broadest sense – research directions, startup ideas, premises for a novel – almost always sound stupid at first. They often make the person who came up with them look stupid. So if a truly Good Idea always starts out by looking unserious, then the only way to have one is to get comfortable producing stupid things.
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