The Weird Nerd comes with trade-offs

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is mainly due, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also p

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In a fast-paced world full of intense economic/scientific/intellectual competition and decreasing opportunities for solitude, it is harder than ever before to justify spending significant time on intangible work that may or may not pay off. You can’t put on your resume—“I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas and scribbling notes that I don’t sh... See more

Simler uses the example of academic research to demonstrate how this works in “Going Critical.” He distinguishes between Real Science, or “whatever habits and practices reliably produce knowledge,” and careerists, who are “motivated by personal ambition.” Careerists “gum up the works” of Real Science communities, promoting themselves instead of con

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I spent many years telling myself that if I try hard enough and am a talented person, than I should be able to thrive in the work culture that surrounded me—that fast-paced, extroverted, competitive, hard core, pedal to the metal, go-big-or-go-home culture. A failure to thrive there was clearly my own failure to hack it in the world, a failure of e... See more

To win one of these coveted positions, then, you need to do everything exactly right from your freshman year of high school onward: get good grades, garner strong recommendations, work in the right labs, publish papers in prestigious places, never make anybody mad, and never take a detour or a break. (I occasionally get emails from high schoolers b... See more