March-April Consumption

The Mathematical Reason Most People Never “Make It”

Interesting article on substack. I found myself thinking over Price’s Law - which states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work. It got me thinking of my own work, my teams and performance and patterns.

Correlations Between Avocations, Scientific Style, Work Habits, and Professional Impact of Scientists - basically, what differentiated Nobel Laureates from other intelligent scientists

Root-Bernstein, Bernstein & Garnier (1995) analysed data originally collected by psychologist Bernice Eiduson, who tracked 40 male scientists from 1958–1978 through interviews and psychological tests. Four won Nobel Prizes; eleven entered the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers then sent a follow-up questionnaire in 1988 to correlate hobbies, thinking styles, and work habits with scientific impact.

The biggest differentiator wasn’t IQ or hours worked. It was the integration of outside interests into scientific thinking. High-impact scientists:

• Had artistic/musical hobbies: painting, drawing, photography, and music were significantly correlated with top citation rankings

• Thought visually: the most successful scientists mentally “saw” their problems in 3D; visual thinking was the strongest cognitive predictor of success

• Had broad, diverse avocations: the total number of hobbies correlated with impact

• Were physically active: walking, swimming, sailing, and exercise were linked to success

• Got insights away from the desk: breakthroughs happened while working on other problems, not by grinding directly at the original one

What the least successful scientists did differently

• Dropped hobbies to focus entirely on work

• Believed more hours = more output

• Treated outside interests as competitors for time, not as assets

• Had no connection between their leisure activities and their thinking

Successful scientists built what the authors call “integrated networks of enterprise” - their hobbies, physical activity, and thinking styles all reinforced each other and fed back into their science. Less successful scientists had the same number of activities but they were fragmented and competing, not connected.

The Nobel laureates, almost to a man, described themselves as “lazy” - they worked intensely when inspired, then stepped away entirely. The least successful ones were the ones obsessively logging hours.

The Ozempicization of the Economy

So many great nuggets.

"One example of an individual optimization tool that really works is Ozempic. Some people need to be on it for medical reasons¹ and others are self-admittedly doing it for aesthetics. To be clear, Ozempic is a wonderful technology that solves a very real problem for individuals but it leaves the collective problem like the food system and healthcare access² untouched.

It also marks a shift. The internal body has a thing we can really control, with time and resources. What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything - Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity. Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled."

"Raymond Williams wrote in 1961 that “every aspect of our personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life” and yet we insist on seeing it in completely personal terms - and all of this is a great case study of that." - what a great sentence!!

Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci Part 1

Listened to this podcast. I thought LDV’s life was quite surreal. The fact that he was both an artist but also a scientist of some sort - a contradictory combination for that time period - and quite eccentric, a maverick.

I was intrigued by how diverse his creativity was and not limited to a medium nor a field. There’s a point in the podcast where the host mentions that he decided to leave for another city and would make his own money by being commissioned for his skills or his intellect.

Although it sounds so incredibly obvious and is pretty much what everyone does, I found it interesting that he was so confident and knowledgeable about what he knew that he was willing to sell his “expertise” to whoever wanted to pay for it. Doing so also allowed for him to independent of any guild or master. And he found a patron who not only had insatiable curiosity but also gave Leonardo the freedom to do his research and experiments.