sayemm

Very interesting comment, can you give any other examples of this?

Really clever hack and entertaining blog post!

Love this author's writing, esp this other post of his on Playing to Win - http://robertheaton.com/2014/11/03/why-you-should-read-playi...

A hacker at heart.

This is a killer idea! Looking forward to seeing where it goes... will be as helpful, if not more, than ERC has been for me while searching for answers.

And when it really comes down to it, I'd argue that's the personal sacrifice that's required to become great at anything.

Just like PG says in The Anatomy of Determination - http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

Nice analogy!

Yes, it's spot-on with K. Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance and deliberate practice:

- http://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.html

- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/ericsson.lo...

Interesting how he says that extremely high IQ may even be a disadvantage:

And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that. At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess... Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.

And that his big shtick is his focus, intuition, and domain expertise - not his IQ:

No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.

This reminds me of Walter Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs and how it detailed his many eccentric habits and behaviors early on before starting Apple... how he never took showers while working at Atari, his odd dietary habits, his daily wardrobe, etc. But that's why he was able to "think different"...

"A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)"

Also very good is Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research" talk - http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html