Going out on a limb - because I have great respect for Paul Graham, I find this wrong headed. People have two kinds of thinking. Linear and Pattern. The proble

Going out on a limb - because I have great respect for Paul Graham, I find this wrong headed. People have two kinds of thinking. Linear and Pattern. The problem with Pattern thinking is that it can't talk. Linear thinking can talk (think about it). How do we recognize faces? Do we use linear analysis - not at all, we just know. Is this genius? No. We all can do it, and we do it all the time. So no, this is not genius, this is just something we do and that linear thinking cannot explain. A la flatland. Lets suppose this is true, that we are of two minds and one can articulate and the other cannot. Can we culture our intuitive mind? We often call Pattern thinking intuition, and Paul Graham raises a good condition for intuition, one that we are beginning to understand from neural networks - that you need lots of data and lots of training with data to have good intuition. Obsession will do it. Another prerequisite, as he points out is disinterest. You can either attempt to find the pattern or you can attempt to prove the pattern. Personally, I like to think of this as original thinker. We all can be original thinkers, and in fact many startups come from original thinking. We see something around us with a pattern that makes no sense so we attempt to think, we essay, about the matter. Just a thought.