The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius — LessWrong

This experience is common in the childhoods of people who go on to do great work, as I have written elsewhere. Nearly everyone who does great work has some episode of early solitary work. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which ... See more

“Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the... See more

The stories our culture tells about creativity almost always concern individuals: think Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Kanye West. These stories are tempting because they are simple, because they appeal to our veneration for individualism, because we love our heroes. We have very few models for storytelling that concern small groups of people, or ent... See more

For those of us who are not geniuses, it may be tempting to outsource some portion of our creativity to the AI, so we can get past the fact of our non-geniousness, but those barriers and climbing them is the work of creativity. The goal isn’t to become a genius. It’s to do the work.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.