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Fierce Nerds
May 2021
Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In
ordinary social situations they are -- as quiet and diffident
as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the
middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they
are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is
an illusion due to the fact that when non-nerds observe them,
it's usually in ordinary social situations. In fact some nerds
are quite fierce.
The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are
as a rule extremely competitive -- more competitive, I'd say,
than highly competitive non-nerds. Competition is more
personal for them. Partly perhaps because they're not
emotionally mature enough to distance themselves from it, but
also because there's less randomness in the kinds of
competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified
in taking the results personally.
Fierce nerds also tend to be somewhat overconfident,
especially when young. It might seem like it would be a
disadvantage to be mistaken about one's abilities, but
empirically it isn't. Up to a point, confidence is a
self-fullfilling prophecy.
Another quality you find in most fierce nerds is intelligence.
Not all nerds are smart, but the fierce ones are always at
least moderately so. If they weren't, they wouldn't have the
confidence to be fierce. [1]
There's also a natural connection between nerdiness and
independent-mindedness. It's hard to be independent-minded
without being somewhat socially awkward, because conventional
beliefs are so often mistaken, or at least arbitrary. No one
who was both independent-minded and ambitious would want to
waste the effort it takes to fit in. And the
independent-mindedness of the fierce nerds will obviously be
of the aggressive rather than the passive type: they'll be
annoyed by rules, rather than dreamily unaware of them.
I'm less sure why fierce nerds are impatient, but most seem to
be. You notice it first in conversation, where they tend to
interrupt you. This is merely annoying, but in the more
promising fierce nerds it's connected to a deeper impatience
about solving problems. Perhaps the competitiveness and
impatience of fierce nerds are not separate qualities, but two
manifestations of a single underlying drivenness.
When you combine all these qualities in sufficient quantities,
the result is quite formidable. The most vivid example of
fierce nerds in action may be James Watson's The Double Helix.
The first sentence of the book is "I have never seen Francis
Crick in a modest mood," and the portrait he goes on to paint
of Crick is the quintessential fierce nerd: brilliant,
socially awkward, competitive, independent-minded,
overconfident. But so is the implicit portrait he paints of
himself. Indeed, his lack of social awareness makes both
portraits that much more realistic, because he baldly states
all sorts of opinions and motivations that a smoother person
would conceal. And moreover it's clear from the story that
Crick and Watson's fierce nerdiness was integral to their
success. Their independent-mindedness caused them to consider
approaches that most others ignored, their overconfidence
allowed them to work on problems they only half understood
(they were literally described as "clowns" by one eminent
insider), and their impatience and competitiveness got them to
the answer ahead of two other groups that would otherwise have
found it within the next year, if not the next several months.
[2]
The idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one
not just to many normal people but even to some young nerds.
Especially early on, nerds spend so much of their time in
ordinary social situations and so little doing real work that
they get a lot more evidence of their awkwardness than their
power. So there will be some who read this description of the
fierce nerd and realize "Hmm, that's me." And it is to you,
young fierce nerd, that I now turn.
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is
that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult
problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical
problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world
progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the
right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of
them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce
nerds.
Indeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in
business than in nerds' original territory of scholarship.
Fierceness seems optional there. Darwin for example doesn't
seem to have been especially fierce. Whereas it's impossible
to be the CEO of a company over a certain size without being
fierce, so now that nerds can win at business, fierce nerds
will increasingly monopolize the really big successes.
The bad news is that if it's not exercised, your fierceness
will turn to bitterness, and you will become an intellectual
playground bully: the grumpy sysadmin, the forum troll, the
hater, the shooter down of new ideas.
How do you avoid this fate? Work on ambitious projects. If you
succeed, it will bring you a kind of satisfaction that
neutralizes bitterness. But you don't need to have succeeded
to feel this; merely working on hard projects gives most
fierce nerds some feeling of satisfaction. And those it
doesn't, it at least keeps busy. [3]
Another solution may be to somehow turn off your fierceness,
by devoting yourself to meditation or psychotherapy or
something like that. Maybe that's the right answer for some
people. I have no idea. But it doesn't seem the optimal
solution to me. If you're given a sharp knife, it seems to me
better to use it than to blunt its edge to avoid cutting
yourself.
If you do choose the ambitious route, you'll have a tailwind
behind you. There has never been a better time to be a nerd.
In the past century we've seen a continuous transfer of power
from dealmakers to technicians -- from the charismatic to the
competent -- and I don't see anything on the horizon that will
end it. At least not till the nerds end it themselves by
bringing about the singularity.
Notes
[1] To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two
distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as
everyone else, but badly, and to be playing a different game.
The smart nerds are the latter type.
[2] The same qualities that make fierce nerds so effective can
also make them very annoying. Fierce nerds would do well to
remember this, and (a) try to keep a lid on it, and (b) seek
out organizations and types of work where getting the right
answer matters more than preserving social harmony. In
practice that means small groups working on hard problems.
Which fortunately is the most fun kind of environment anyway.
[3] If success neutralizes bitterness, why are there some
people who are at least moderately successful and yet still
quite bitter? Because people's potential bitterness varies
depending on how naturally bitter their personality is, and
how ambitious they are: someone who's naturally very bitter
will still have a lot left after success neutralizes some of
it, and someone who's very ambitious will need proportionally
more success to satisfy that ambition.
So the worst-case scenario is someone who's both naturally
bitter and extremely ambitious, and yet only moderately
successful.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Steve Blank, Patrick Collison,
Jessica Livingston, Amjad Masad, and Robert Morris for reading
drafts of this.
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