Two things happened this past month that provided me genuine insight into a complex problem that mankind has been grappling with for many centuries now. The nature of genius. What constitutes genius? What makes an immeasurably talented blogger (me) a genius of a writer (me)? What makes Vishy Anand win a tournament? That's probably not a great example, he made some bad moves now and then. Let's focus instead on what made me win an under-16 Pune intra-school chess tournament at the tender age of 21 apart from a fake birth certificate.
The first insight I got was from Malcolm Gladell's 'Outliers'. His contention is that a genius has to first put in 10000 hours of hard work. I did that through my insightful and profoundly philosophical blog posts, of course. What separates me from the likes of Einstein, Bill Gates, Da Vinci and other such luminaries is not the fact that their genius was in any way inferior to my own, but the fact that I have achieved what I have on the internet, and those dudes definitely didn't have to compete with online porn! Also the now well-known fact that I'm pseudoanarchistcapitallibertarianistic with subtle rightwingy tendencies while they were not.
The second insight came when our very own Vishy Anand was crowned World Champion. This took me back to the days when I was playing pro-chess myself while solving relativity problems and watching Small Wonder on Star World all at the same time. I remembered the time when I, embarrassingly enough, played a novel opening move that had never been tried in the history of the game. If you must know, I tried to move my king.
What I'm really trying to say is that innate talent, which I have in excess, is never enough. If you think I just woke up one day a genius, think again. I also put in the hours. When my impulse was to unwind with some light reading like Kant or Kafka, I instead chose to blog incessantly about Rakhie Sawant. It's no wonder that my book turned out to be, in the opinion of one of blogosphere's stalwarts (again, me), the bestest book ever.
- Am it
2 comments:
for reference :)
http://in.news.yahoo dot com/columnist/amit_varma/3/the-man-with-the-maruti-800
and
http://in.news.yahoo dot com/columnist/amit_varma/7/give-me-10000-hours
hee hee :)))
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