DD > Didio
I KNOW THIS HAS BECOME A MIHALY CKIKSZENTMIHALY BLOG LATELY BUT THIS IS JUST ON MY MIND A LOT RIGHT NOW:
So! This book I’m reading. Ckikszentmihaly is a Hungarian psychologist who wanted to study like greatness so he assembled as many examples as he possibly could of people operating at seemingly the the peak of human ability (writers, scientists, leaders, artists: people who had contributed significantly to ‘the canon’ but were still alive to interview, i think it was 91 people total? sidenote he tried for gender parity as much as possible which speaking as someone who’s had to read a lot of these studies lately is PRETTY REFRESHING) and what he found, over and over and over again was that, in contradiction to the whole ‘troubled loner genius’ stereotype, the vast majority of people out there changing the world have a super strong support structure and this is not an accident.
Close-knit families and long happy marriages were the norm (30% of respondents, and that’s including a lot of men, still listed their family as the thing they were proudest of, ahead of like Nobel Prizes). Their spouses took up some of the day-to-day tasks to free up more time, their kids gave them a reason to keep going, their peers inspired them, etc. Also, there was plenty of ‘found family’ stuff going on (A LOTTTT of them were serving as mentors of some kind.)
tl;dr in addition to ~the tragedy of the solitary exceptional man~ being shitty storytelling it is also profoundly inaccurate, it is hard to be a hero in a vacuum okay, as someone once said, to save the world you need to live in it
you need DARE I SAY a team