The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
They were blue-collar artists. They just tried. They did not wait for ideal conditions. Solomon in Ecclesiastes 11 preaches such wisdom. They planted seeds without bothering to check the weather. Some of their seeds sprouted anyway, while those who waited for perfect weather, never planted at all, and grew nothing.<p>&quot;Genius&quot; is just practice, and deliberate at that. You don&#x27;t see it. It&#x27;s not some dramatic characteristic that you see in Paul McCartney, or whoever; No, John Nash was not intensely examining numbers and equations as they were dramatically floating around him like in &quot;A Beautiful Mind&quot;. He did exactly what you do, only without the neuroticism; without the time-wasting; without the rumination.<p>Just plant the damned seeds. See what happens. Stop wasting your time ruminating. Imagine if Bach, or Da Vinci, Palestrina, Van Gogh, or Von Neumann decided to wait, and wait, until everything was just right, before they begin their studies&#x2F;work. Nobody today would recognize those names. You would not be able to listen to Missa Papae Marcelli. It would just not exist. These people would be called &quot;workaholics&quot; today, an incredibly unfortunate term. Bach wrote over 1,000 pieces in his career. Van Gogh has over 900 paintings in less than 10 years.<p>As far as I can see at this point, &quot;geniuses&quot; are simply people who do not waste their time. Q3&#x2F;Q4 of the Eisenhower Matrix is another planet to them. They live on the &quot;Important&quot; row, and they utilize that time.<p>To tie this into the HN community - think of the people who &quot;want to learn to program&quot; and yet they spend all of their time ruminating on which book to read, or language to learn, et cetera.