"In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It’s an unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the goal of nu

"In short, we over-reward those at the top and dismiss the rest. It’s an unhelpful and unnecessary bias that facilitates hero worship, undermines the goal of nurturing creativity and discourages valuable contributions to communities, worthy causes and scientific projects" I don't think "the rest" are in any way "dismissed", but certainly it's much more interesting to read about a Feynman, Saussure or Pascal, than the more mediocre people around them. Reading about a hard working and helpful but relatively average group of helpers seems profoundly boring, and our attention is quite limited, so naturally all coverage focuses on the more interesting luminairies at the apex. Besides, it's not even true that all these people were heavily dependent on big teams of helpers, especially not before the mid last century or so. Did Leibniz get much help? Did Newton rely on dozens of graduate students? Did Dostoyevskiy have a team of writers? Hardly. The geniuses of old worked pretty much alone. But coming back to the main point, isn't it precisely this "hero worship" that makes the teams work so hard for these geniuses? And why would this focus necessarily discourage any creativity? I don't see why it would. It's not like people, when they inevitably discover that they are not Einstein, give up science completely. The situation is the same in sports, most people are not going to set any records, but they don't stop training, despite the total focus on a few individual top level athletes. If the author feels that things should be different, why not try writing a book about these teams, and see if people are actually interested in hearing about them.