Personal Take on Obsession and the ‘Bus Ticket Theory of Genius’

Disclaimer: The following is my take on the fantastic article on Mindset — “The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius (paulgraham.com)”, by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. All credits go to the original writer. You can consider this a summary or a redundancy, this is just my attempt to pen my thoughts after reading this fantastic article. Hope you have a good read!

Obsession

Obsession is the missing ingredient to make your work great.

Have you ever collected old stamp papers, or coins? If yes, you are also a member of the ‘Bus ticket collectors’ — the imaginary group of people who are obsessed enough to remember and care about the nitty-gritties and minute distinctions between different bus tickets (or coins or stamp papers).

For the rest of us, there’s no point in it, for them it is a whole point in itself — because they do it for their own sake.

Disinterested obsession

The term disinterested is used in the spirit of being interested without any biases, to convey a pure form of interest. It is good because:

1. It brings luck closer to you — Waiting for a chance is easier when you’re obsessed, well for one you won’t be worried about chance a lot if you’re obsessed with something else, and also an obsessed mind is a prepared mind, as Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind”

2. It is a natural filter for earnestness. If you are genuinely interested in something, you don’t need to prove your earnestness.

3. It helps in generating new ideas, the path to great ideas is often the one less trodden.

What’s the difference between being merely ambitious and obsessed?

Being merely ambitious can sometimes set you on a journey dangling between various paths as opportunities arise, and often overlook the beauty of irrationality of obsession that would otherwise lead to stumbling upon new ideas. The thing with obsession is it can’t be helped.

Darwin didn’t discover new species because he was talented at identifying them, he was just really into observing animals. JRR Tolkien created a whole new language for his flagship ‘Lord of the Rings’. Anyone in their right rational mind wouldn’t do that.

Ingredients of Genius

It doesn’t start with an intention to make a great discovery, but just with a sense of liking of doing something.

When that something starts to matter — like Ramanujam obsessing over various mathematical series, the beginnings of genius start to appear.

There are two other ingredients to genius — determination and natural ability. But they share a relation with obsession.

Obsession is a good proxy for determination, and without a natural aptitude for something it’s difficult to stay determined and obsessed, for the most part. My two cents — I believe acquired abilities by practice can augment natural abilities to help with sustaining obsession, provided you are determined enough. Well, it seems like a circular relationship, but each part plays a crucial role in determining the outcome, best captured in the quote from the article

‘You don’t need to push yourself as hard when curiosity is pulling you’

How to know if something matters?

There’s no way to know which path would lead to greatness, but there are some heuristics that can be used to answer this question.

1. Building something is more promising than consuming what others create.
2. If it is difficult for other people than it is for you, it’s more promising.
3. If you have a talent for what you’re obsessed about, like music, it’s likely to be more promising.

An interesting and alarming caveat is: Doing great work comes with a lot of time being wasted. You can never be too sure about what matters, but if you are obsessed with doing something that interests you, it’s hard to consider it a waste of time and it could potentially end up being useful. Newton’s famous obsessions were math, alchemy, and theology, while the latter two resulted in being a waste of his time, his first one is living and breathing as what call now call Physics.

Time is a factor that affects the outcomes of obsession. If Darwin had been born is 1700’s instead of 1800’s, we might have never heard of him.

To combat uncertainty,

1. Hedge your bets by keeping it a mix of conventionally promising paths and personal, probably unconventional, interests. It’s often the unconventional paths that lead to new discoveries.
2. Expand the breadth of genuine interests — but at the danger of losing depth by having too many to handle.

The Bus Ticket Theory

Summarizing some insights from what is called the Bus Ticket Theory:

1. Genius is defined as an infinite capacity for taking pains, with the source of this emerging from infinite interest rather than infinite diligence (as mentioned in Carlyle’s definition of genius)
2. Different people are interested in different things, and this is a much better explanation for the skewed distribution of great work in various field. If it were only upto natural ability, this distribution would not have been so skewed.
3. When external interests, especially in the form of powerful ones like having children, start competing with other interests, and make it less likely for people to do great work.
4. It is encouraging to know that cultivating interests has a direct bearing on cultivating genius.
5. Remain irresponsible — the theory states that people who age have fewer ideas not due to them losing their edge, but due to the loss in the freedom of experimenting with random side projects after being established. The element of uncertainty increases a lot while doing this, but it’ll at least be fun to work on what we want.

References: 1. The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius (paulgraham.com)

2. Chance Favors the Prepared Mind — Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings (lindau-nobel.org)

3. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains — Oxford Reference