Steve Hsu: belief

Transcript context

…The Bezos example is fascinating. For the people in the audience who might not know: His original plan was to become a theoretical physicist. He didn't pursue it because he noticed one of his friends was just so much obviously more gifted than him at that skill. The story they tell us is about Bezos working on a problem for many hours and making no progress before asking a friend who solved the entire problem in his mind. Basically, Bezos realized that it (theoretical physics) was not his competitive advantage. I gotta add one anecdote. So, I know many of the guys in Bezos’ eating club, we also tick because we're very similar in vintage, a lot of them were late. So I know all these guys, I know all these Bezos stories. The funny thing is the guy you're talking about (guy who solved the physics problem in his mind), whose name I believe is Asana, is a Sri Lankan guy. He went to grad school at Caltech. At one point, we met up at Caltech when I was visiting, and he was in grad school. I met this guy and talked to him about Bezos. We had other friends in common so we weren't focused on Bezos, but yeah, I met this guy in that anecdote that you just mentioned. That's good to know. Because that is relevant to my question. My friend and I have continually debated the importance of intelligence at the peak of entrepreneurial or engineering ability. And he uses that anecdote to say, “Oh, look, Bezos was not smart enough to be a theoretical physicist. So, therefore, intelligence is not that important. Beyond a confident, not incredibly high point. And afterward, Bezos was creative or blah, blah, blah. He was hard working.” I don't know; my perception of the story was, “Okay, he's not intelligent enough to be a theoretical physicist. He's below five standard deviations or four standard deviations above the mean; clearly, just studying physics at Princeton is itself a testament that it's probably at least two or three standard deviations about, well, at least three.” What was the perception of those people you talked to at Princeton, about Jeff Bezos? Is it that he just was super hardworking or creative? Or is intelligence super high, just not high enough to be a theoretical physicist?…

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