Dumb enough to make great discoveries

One piece of wisdom I’ve earned from decades of theory is that my success across many areas, including several seminal discoveries, is not due to thinking I’m smart.

It is due to my keen recognition that I am dumb as rocks.

Good theory can take years of grinding away at what looks hopeless. If I had too much confidence in my intelligence, I’d give up early:

“Well, I don’t see a solution. And because I’m brilliant, there must not be one.”

But I know better.

I know I can stare at a problem for years and still fail to see the obvious - the thing that, once seen, seems embarrassingly clear in retrospect.

Most hard theoretical breakthroughs are not that hard to explain afterwards. The difficulty is getting there. It doesn’t take much before a problem overwhelms our intuitions, and we collapse into barely guided trial and error, repeated untold times, until some new perspective finally clicks.

And then it feels like it was sitting there the whole time.

That’s the life of a theorist. A successful one.

Confidence.

Not confidence that you’re smart.

Confidence that you’re dumb enough to have missed the obvious.