Grant Sanderson: evaluation

Transcript context

…You know what I mean. Maybe 20 years. So yeah, it can't just be that. I don't know there's a bunch of possible things you could say. One is you're in a situation in life where you have nothing else going for you or you're just really free for that one year and then you become successful after that year is over based on what you did. But what is your take? I don't know. I agree that's probably multiple factors, not one. One thing could be that the miracle year is like the exhalation and there's been many, many years of inhalation. The classic one is Einstein's where his miracle year were also some of the first papers springing onto the scene, and I would guess that a lot of the ideas were not bumping around his head only in that year but it's many many years of thinking about it and coalescing. And so you might be in a position where you can build up all of this potential energy and then for whatever reason there's one time in life that lends itself to actually releasing all of that. If I try to reflect on my own history with what I'm doing now I think I didn't appreciate early on how much potential energy I had simply from being a student in college where there's just a bunch of ways of thinking about things, or empathy with new learners, or just cool concepts right? The basic concept behind a video that in fact it was many many years of like all of my time having learned math before I started putting out stuff online that I was able to eat into. The well never runs dry there's always a long list of things that I want to cover but in some sense like I recognize that the well was at risk of running dry in a way that I never thought that it could and without being a little deliberate about devoting some of my day not just of output and producing but to stepping back and like learning new things and touching something I never would have that doesn't happen by default. I don't know if this is all also the case for the people who have had genuine miracle years where they were like letting out all of this stuff and then it takes a decade to build up that same level of potential energy. The other thing is you have everything to gain and nothing to lose when you are young. So even if it's not merely youth, there's a willingness to be creative and there's also none of the obligations that come from having found success before. There's certain academics who made an extremely deliberate effort not to let the curse of success happen or there's some term for it but I think maybe James Watson had this standard reply to invitations for you know talks and interviews and things like that. It was basically like, “No to everyone because I just want to be a scientist.” It was much more articulate than that and he has all these nine points but that was the gist of it. Short of doing that I think it's very easy for someone to have a lot of other things that eat into their mind share and time and all of that such that even if it's just 20 hours a week, that really interrupts a creative flow. Were you a student when you started the channel?…

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