The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

[The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius]

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| November 2019Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability
and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as
well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group
of people, and I'm going to choose bus ticket collectors. There
are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they
have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect.
They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus
tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember. Because
we don't care enough. What's the point of spending so much time
thinking about old bus tickets?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.When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, you
see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket
collector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemed
pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking
features of Darwin's book about his voyage on the Beagle is the
sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems
infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on
his slate what happens to series.It's a mistake to think they were "laying the groundwork" for the
discoveries they made later. There's too much intention in that
metaphor. Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it
because they liked it.But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket
collector. Series matter, and bus tickets don't.If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might
be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you
might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for
ability and a substitute for determination. Unless you have
sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting.
And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't need
as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when
curiosity is pulling you.An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent
anything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind,
and if there's one thing an obsessed mind is, it's prepared.The disinterestedness of this kind of obsession is its most important
feature. Not just because it's a filter for earnestness, but because
it helps you discover new ideas.The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they
looked promising, other people would already have explored them.
How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others
overlook? The popular story is that they simply have better vision:
because they're so talented, they see paths that others miss. But
if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that's not what
happens. Darwin didn't pay closer attention to individual species
than other people because he saw that this would lead to great
discoveries, and they didn't. He was just really, really interested
in such things.Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan. They didn't
discover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising,
but because they couldn't help it. That's what allowed them to
follow paths that someone who was merely ambitious would have
ignored.What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels
was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish
language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern
Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.The bus ticket theory is similar to Carlyle's famous definition of
genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. But there are two
differences. The bus ticket theory makes it clear that the source
of this infinite capacity for taking pains is not infinite diligence,
as Carlyle seems to have meant, but the sort of infinite interest
that collectors have. It also adds an important qualification: an
infinite capacity for taking pains about something that matters.So what matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because no
one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can
discover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.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.But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea
that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great
work, you also have to waste a lot of time.In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that
rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great
work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn
out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.I'm not sure if this is true. On one hand, it seems surprisingly
difficult to waste your time so long as you're working hard on
something interesting. So much of what you do ends up being useful.
But on the other hand, the rule about the relationship between risk
and reward is so powerful that it seems to hold wherever risk occurs.
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.Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets? It
probably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because
these people don't become famous.It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to
predict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good
time to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had
been born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard of
him.What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution is
to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously
promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with
any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk. If you
forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more
conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful
that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the
time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail.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.One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may
help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds
of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability.
If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural
ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories

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