>why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising question but much of the implicit pre

>why do so many smart people fail to discover anything new? Given his background as a venture capitalist not a surprising question but much of the implicit premise of the piece is that novelty is somehow superior to maintaining things that exist, which isn't that obvious. doing 'new' things is fine but the world to a large degree runs on maintaining and very marginally improving what we have or just fixing things in very small ways that would probably not pass his excitement test. Before someone like Einstein can come along and dig up some paradigm changing idea it often takes decades of work to refine something to the point where some individual can come along and discover what's wrong with it. Even within an individual life like Einstein's that is the kind of work he did most of the time. novelty is the exception, a world of novelty after novelty without long periods of ordinary work during which people refine is hard to imagine. So just like 80% of Einstein's life was probably doing normal maths, 80% of people are probably going to do normal things, there's nothing wrong with it. It's like the popular analogy of a handful of astronauts standing on the backs of hundreds of people. Every single one of them does a necessary job, and a lot of smart people will do work that in the world of Paul Graham is somehow considered unglamorous.