The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

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:…

Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it because they liked it. But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket collector.…

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.…

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…

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…

It might be at least as useful to ask yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that probably wouldn't be important but would be…

Notes [1] There are other types of collecting that illustrate this point better than bus tickets, but they're also more popular. It seemed just as…