David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Which is what do you do with that information? You realize you have to add a few of your skills together to become the best at something. You have to be smart and something else. Jim’s own words on this are, I was a good mathematician. I wasn’t the greatest in the world, but I was pretty good. But he recognizes, like you said, Ben, that he has a different advantage that most of the super geniuses lacked. And that’s, as he put it, he had good taste. These are his words. “Taste in science is very important. To distinguish what’s a good problem and what’s a problem that no one’s going to care about the answer to anyway, that’s taste. And I think I have good taste. ” By the way, this is exactly the same thing as Jeff Bezos in college, realizing he wanted to be a theoretical physicist. He met some of the extreme brainpower people that would go on to become the best theoretical physicists in the world. He said, I’m smart, but I’m not that smart, so switched to computer science.…

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