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“For most of the problems that I’ve solved, I can identify the moment and tell the story about the moment where a certain solution came into my mind,” Spielman
by djmips 4y ago
“For most of the problems that I’ve solved, I can identify the moment and tell the story about the moment where a certain solution came into my mind,” Spielman said. “But that’s just because I’ve spent an absurd amount of hours working on them.”
I feel the same way, if I've ever come up with impressive results in my work it's only after I've spent absurd amount of hours on the problem.
I feel like a fraud until suddenly it all comes together. Like an idiot savant, because the results, often the best amongst my peers, are beyond my normal intelligence. Is that common?
- taneq 4y ago> “But that’s just because I’ve spent an absurd amount of hours working on them.” Uh, yeah? That's how you solve absurdly hard problems. Did he expect to solve real problems, that many people spent their entire lives working on, in a trivial amount of time? This reminds me of an epiphany I had back in highschool where I was thinking "I must be dumb because I have to try REALLY HARD to get the top mark in a science or maths test." Then it hit me that hey, everyone else taking the test is a person too and they're all trying really hard as well, so if I didn't have to try hard that would be weird. > Like an idiot savant, because the results, often the best amongst my peers, are beyond my normal intelligence. Is that common? Seems pretty normal to me, those flashes of insight (or gut feeling around the edge of insight) can be few and far between. You only have to have an insight once, though, if you can then understand and communicate it.