TITLE: If You Want to Create Greatness, Encourage Everyone
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 18, 2020  2:50 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I read two passages in the last few days that echo one another.
First, I read this from Wallace Shawn, in
<a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6154/the-art-of-theater-no-17-wallace-shawn">
   a Paris Review interview</a>:

<blockquote><em>
 But my God, without writers, humanity might be trapped in a swamp
 of idiotic, unchanging provincial clich&eacute;s.  Yes, there are
 writers who merely reinforce people's complacency, but a writer
 like Rachel Carson inspired the activism of millions, and writers
 like Lady Murasaki, Milton, and Joyce have reordered people's
 brains!  And for any writers to exist at all, there must surely
 be a tradition of writing.  Maybe in order for one valuable
 writer to exist, there must be a hundred others who aren't
 valuable at all, but it isn't possible at any given moment for
 anyone to be sure who the valuable one is.
</em></blockquote>

 Then, in
<a href="https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that-build.html">
   his response</a>
 to Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build", Tanner Greer writes:

<blockquote><em>
 To consistently create brilliant poets, you need a society awash
 in mediocre, even tawdry poetry.  Brilliant minds will find their
 way towards poem writing when poem writing and poem reading is the
 thing that people <b>do</b>.
</em></blockquote>

 I once
<a href="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-19T10_10_14.htm">
   blogged briefly</a>
 about <em>The Art of Fear</em> tells the story of an artist
 sketching hundreds of roosters, which laid the foundation for
 creating a single sketch for his client.  For us as individuals,
 this means that "talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long
 run, from perseverance and lots of hard work."  As Richard Gabriel
 often says, "Talent determines only how fast you get good, not how
 good you get".  Volume creates the conditions under which quality
 can appear.

 Shawn and Greer remind us that the same dynamic applies at the
 scale of a culture.  A community that produces many writers has a
 better chance to produce great writers.  When the community values
 writers, it increases the chances that someone will do the work
 necessary to becoming a writer.  The best way to produce a lot of
 writers is to have a tradition that welcomes, even encourages, all
 members of the community to write, even if they aren't great.

 The same applies to other forms of achievement, too.  In particular,
 I think it applies to programming.
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