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GREAT_EGO

                                             August 10, 2010

    For anyone with any ambition at all,
    with any regard for themselves, I
    think it's natural to look to the
    biographies of the great for hints
    on how to live, on how to proceed.

    Talking about this in public can be
    astoundingly difficult to get right.
    You can embarass yourself easily with
    a comparison to someone who seems         ("Einstein skipped a lot of the
    totally out of your league.               academic work and got a job
                                              in the patent office... why
      Ted Nelson's comparison of himself      should I feel trapped by this
      to Walt Disney, to Orson Welles,        day job?")
      and so on can seem very pretentious--

      And yet, after the fact, those             NELSON
      comparisons don't seem so extreme,
      do they?  How many world-changing new
      ideas have *you* had in your life?          The judgement of history
                                                  might very well go the
                                                  other way on this one,
                                                  with Nelson's name
                                                  looming larger than the
                                                  media-geniuses of yore.


    What can you learn from
    those who've gone before?

    Are the extreme cases extreme
    because they made the right              NATURE_OF_THE_WALLS
    moves, or simply because they
    had extreme capabilities and/or          WIDE_FIELD
    extreme luck?


          What are they to me?
          Examples, role models?                  SHALIZI

          Or reminders of limitations,
          nudges toward humility?



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