"Achievement" is a fickle mistress
Friends,
A theme running through recent posts has been about preparing for post HS life, or really helping your kids think about the future. The arguments, with a few substitutions, apply to all of us as well. See:
We’re going to continue the theme today. Maybe get a bit spicier even idk.
I tweeted this:
I gave a talk to this group last fall. They probably think I’m an imbecile. “Do you even lift” NJ accent when I get excited prolly not helping the cause either.
[They justifiably should have preferred to hear Giuseppe Paleologo give a talk based on his essay Buy Side Quant Job Advice or his book which I covered in Notes On Advanced Portfolio Management]
But if you read I've Spent My Whole Life Competing With People Like You, then you know my position — success is more about endurance than IQ. Edison’s 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration thing.
This is simple enough to be usefully true but admittedly incomplete. I’ll start with some excerpts from Henry Oliver’s piece How to raise a (happy) genius where he examines the childhood of the brilliant Geoffrey Hinton to fill in key gaps.
1) he had an exceptional childhood and he worked in a field where ideas aren’t so hard to find, because the subject is new. What ties these two theories together is autonomy: Hinton was free to explore as a child, an undergraduate, and an academic at CIFAR, so that when the opportunity at Google came, he was ready to exploit.
2) A study of Chinese adolescents found that those with high academic achievement and parents who gave them supportive autonomy (parents who were not controlling) were at lower risk of developing depression. Other studies have found that a combination of care and autonomy lowers depression risks. And the pressure to be a perfectionist might bad for your mental health, a neurosis which gets worse as you age: excessive parental expectations correlate with higher levels of anxiety. This is consistent with the other findings that what damages children is not high standards, but being too controlling. Exceptional educations do not mean we have to choose between brilliance and happiness. The key is autonomy.
3) Unoriginal prodigies: This matters today because few child prodigies end up being highly creative or original. Mastering a domain is one thing: changing it, quite another. Psychologist Ellen Winner summarised the research findings like this:
Personality and will are crucial factors in becoming an innovator or revolutionizer of a domain. Creators have a desire to shake things up. They are restless, rebellious, and dissatisfied with the status quo. They are courageous and independent. They are able to manage multiple related projects at the same time, engaging in what Gruber calls a “network of enterprise”. For these two reasons, we should never expect a prodigy to go on to become a creator. The ones who do make this transition are the exception, not the rule
As Adam Grant said, “practice makes perfect, but it doesn’t make new.” That’s a good thing, of course: we all benefit from having superb minds in unoriginal jobs. The very best doctors, engineers, lawyers are essential to the way society functions. But there is room to invoke more originality in the best minds.
And originality is the result of autonomy. Exceptional educations should emphasise freedom. If we can enable more autonomy, we can have high accomplishment and happiness.
This may sound theoretical but that tweet I posted led to a couple telling interactions with some traders. You might interpret them cynically but I think it’s more adaptive to see them as words of caution from reliable sources.
It’s food for thought on the subjects of achievement, autonomy, conformity, and safety/risk.
We’ll start with this reply: