There is Always Someone Better Than You (and What You Can Do About It)

The moment my dreams were shattered (a childhood story)

In the second grade I played in a chess tournament. I made my way somewhat easily to the semi-finals and I still remember exactly how I lost. I remember the exact moves that caused me to fall into a relatively common opening trap (called the Noah’s Ark Trap) and how I lost. After the opening, I got destroyed in the middle game and I got smothered mated. Basically he completely embarrassed me.

The worst part? He was in kindergarten. I cried for a long time. I won some participation thing that my parents tried to cheer me up with, but I was sad for weeks. It wasn’t till much later I realized why I was sad, it was because, in that moment, I realized I would never become a grandmaster.

The one thing I was “good” at someone would always be better.

My aversion to olympiads and competitions

If it’s not clear by now, I am extremely competitive, but I hate competitions. I hate solving problems I can’t choose and being subjugated and restricted by a framework imposed upon me.

I think the reason that IMO winners don’t meet their unreasonably lofty expectations for math research, is because they have not been told to be creative.

My skills are only partly technical, most of them come from creativity and strong asymmetric convictions.

Why creativity matters

“I hate Competition”

• Peter Thiel

Link the talk where he said this (highly recommend!)

Steve Jobs was not the best computer or phone maker. He was actually pretty non technical. All he had was a strong conviction about a problem he saw that nobody else did.

What Thiel is referring to is how there are fundamentally two types of companies: hyper-competitive companies competing for tiny slivers of market share, and disruptors who apply asymmetric thinking to become a monopoly.

Sure, you have to be analytically minded (why do you think technical founders are more successful?), but, you only have to be technical enough to understand the problem. It takes creativity to cast it in a way no one else has and to solve it.

These Olympiads condition kids into thinking that all problems are well defined ones that require patterned solutions. It’s a rats race.

I don’t like only solving problems, I like finding/creating them to.

Everyone is creative

Unequivocally, you are the best at being you. You have unique expriences. Apply those to eachother and use your background as a super power to unlock creativty. What can only someone with your specific background create?

tl;dr

people smarter than you have a shortage of motivation and shortage of problems to work on.

give them both and pretend to know what you’re doing.