Excerpt from a Lex Fridman interview with Lee Smolin (YouTube clip). Smolin recounts Eric Weinstein’s metaphor that geniuses "carried their luggage" until someone added wheels, using it to argue many innovations are obvious in hindsight. He discusses factors that enable unconventional breakthroughs—luck, stubbornness/arrogance, deep caring—and identifies confidence (ego) as central to resisting conventional thinking.
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There are things which are right there in front of us which we miss. And I'll quote my friend Eric Weinstein in saying, look, Einstein carried his luggage. Freud carried his luggage. Marx carried his luggage, Martha Graham carried her luggage, et cetera. Edison carried his luggage. All these geniuses carried their luggage. Not once before, relatively recently, did it occur to anybody to put a wheel on luggage and pull it, and it was right there waiting to be invented for centuries.
So this is Eric Weinstein. Yeah. What do the wheels represent? Are you basically saying that there's stuff right in front of our eyes that once we. It just clicks, we put the wheels in the luggage and a lot of things will fall into place?
Yes, I do. I do. And every day I wake up and think, why can't I be that guy who was walking through the airport?
What do you think it takes to be that guy? Because like you said, a lot of really smart people carry their luggage. What? Just psychologically speaking. So Eric Weinstein is a good example of a person who thinks outside the box.
Yes.
Who resists almost conventional thinking. You're an example of a person who by habits, by psychology, by upbringing, I don't know. But resists conventional thinking as well. Just by nature.
That's a compliment.
That's a compliment. Good. So what do you think it takes to do that? Is that something you were just born with?
I doubt it. Well, I. From my studying some cases, because I'm curious about that, obviously, and just in a more concrete way when I started out in physics, because I started a long way from physics, so it took me a long. Not a long time, but a lot of work to get to study it and get into it. So I did wonder about that. And so I read the biographies. In fact, I started with the autobiography of Einstein and Newton and Galileo and all those people. And I think there's a couple of things. Some of it is luck being in the right place at the right time. Some of it is stubbornness and arrogance, which can easily go wrong. And I know all of these are doorways. If you go through them slightly at the wrong speed or in the wrong angle, they're ways to fail. But if you somehow have the right luck, the right confidence or arrogance, caring. I think Einstein cared to understand nature with a ferocity and a commitment that exceeded other people of his time. So he asked more stubborn questions. He asked deeper questions, I think. And there's a level of ability and whether ability is born in or can be developed at extension, which can be developed like any of these things, like musical talent.
You mentioned ego. What's the role of ego in that process?
Confidence.
Confidence. But do you, in your own life, have you found yourself walking that knife's edge of too much or too little? So being overconfident and therefore leading yourself astray, or not sufficiently confident to throw away the conventional thinking of whatever the theory of the day of theoretical physics?
I don't know if I. I mean, I've contributed what I've contributed. Whether if I had had more confidence in something, I would have gotten further, I don't know. Well, certainly I'm sitting here at this moment with very much my own approach to nearly everything, and I'm calm. I'm happy about that. But on the other hand, I know people whose self confidence vastly exceeds mine. And sometimes I think it's justified, and sometimes I think it's not justified.
