Weekend May 14, 2023
Andy Kessler 5/14/2023
Dear Grads: Finish that “Ruth Bader Ginsborg” jug at your final borg party. Wind down your Wednesday Addams and M3gan dances. Quit hating on Nepo Babies. And stop saying “super great” like NoHo Hank on HBO’s “Barry,” even ironically. This merits your attention.
The expression “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” is often attributed to Thomas Edison. But apparently around 1890, a writer and academic named Kate Sanborn gave a lecture saying genius was a combination of inspiration and perspiration and “talent is perspiration.” Even without Twitter, ideas floated around and permeated society. When Edison was later asked what genius was, he answered “2% is genius and 98% is hard work.” When asked if genius was inspired, he blurted out, “Bah! Genius isn’t inspired. Inspiration is perspiration.”
Two lessons here: 1) If you have great ideas, others will repeat them without attribution. 2) There was a lot of sweating going on in the 19th century—modern antiperspirant wasn’t available until 1941.
Let me update the saying for the 21st century: “Success is 1% inspiration and 99% preparation.” Ideas are shooting around faster than ever, but most are worthless because no one does the hard work to implement them. Implementation requires hours and hours not of sweat—we’re in a service economy now—but of preparation. You must do it all: reading, researching, falling into one rabbit hole after another on the internet to find the right series of precedents and test cases and quotes to make your point, pitching your idea coherently and succinctly so it doesn’t sound pie-in-the-sky but practical.
Preparation is everything! Forget football’s old-timey “3 yards and a cloud of dust.” After a 2021 touchdown, Los Angeles Rams receiver Cooper Kupp shared his read of the defense: “They had a little three-deep fire zone. Brought the nickel off the edge, safety dropped down. They didn’t look like they were doing a replacement fire zone.” That level of understanding required preparation, memorization and practice. And news flash, Stephen Curry draining half-court shots isn’t luck.
Watch the amazing 2021 video of the Perseverance rover landing on the surface of Mars. The onboard camera shows the terrain. After the landing, I’m pretty sure one of the scientists exclaims, “Hey, that’s my rock.” In mission preparation, the entire landing area was digitized. The planners knew the placement of every rock and dip in terrain. We’ve come a long way from Neil Armstrong with a joystick. No room for error. Prepare, simulate, fix and prepare again.
Churchill famously memorized his speeches and practiced giving them over and over in his bathtub and pacing his room while chomping on a cigar. Some of this was to overcome his stutter, but it was mainly to get the intonation and alliteration just right. Nothing was off-the-cuff. His speeches didn’t sound like they were read from a piece of paper; they felt stream of consciousness. In his finest hours he showed the value of preparation.
Sadly, there is an all-out war on merit and a push for equality of results no matter how much work you put in. You’ve lived it: de-emphasized grades and aptitude tests, “holistic” admissions, identity hiring. That is anti-progress. Whenever I hear the overused expression “woke,” I think W.O.K.E.—War on Knowledge Excellence. The opposite of merit is mediocrity, the default of the lazy. Don’t fall for it. Instead, stand out and prove your merit by working, by preparing.
Yes, preparation is merit. Though devalued in the pretend world of admissions and politics, in the dog-eat-dog world of real life and careers and advancement and progress, preparation and merit are the currency of the realm.
Use all the tools at your disposal: books, search, mobile screens and now artificial intelligence and large language models. But aren’t those distracting? Sure, but you’ve been training your whole life for this, multitasking lectures, TikTok feasts, scanning tweets and playing videogames, often simultaneously. Use it to your advantage.
But, you may ask, why put in any extra effort? ChatGPT can pass Advanced Placement tests, entry exams for law and medical school, and even the bar exam. That probably says more about how lame those tests are than about AI’s ability. But even though AI can answer almost any prompt you throw at it, it is worthless in an elevator when your boss asks you what you think about new product ideas or sales prospects in Omaha.
The only answer comes from that 99% preparation. Study everything, not only the task you’ve been assigned. Dig deep. Come up with ideas and potential solutions. Work on an elevator pitch for what excites you. Don’t wing it. Prepare. And trust me, the feeling you get from preparation-induced success is better than anything you can buy at a dispensary. Preparation will make you super great.
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