Paul Graham：The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius, Excerpt 1

Everyone 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.

Source： https://paulgraham.com/genius.html
Locator：Essay, additional excerpt 1 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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