Grigori Perelman, a brilliant mathematician, rejected a major prize and told officials he was busy picking mushrooms. The story illustrates a bigger point: genius rebels get celebrated, but the real risk is becoming so attached to that identity that you lose balance in everything else.
Grigori Perelman won the Nobel Prize for math and he turned it down. And he's like, I'm not, I'm not about this. I didn't do this for this reason. And then like someone calls him to say, hey, you won the prize. And his famous quote was, you're disturbing me from picking mushrooms. And he hung up and he never collected the prize. He never collected the prize. Yeah, exactly. He did not. And you hear about these guys that are rebellious like this. And what I've noticed is that the worst thing that you could do is to be unbalanced about where you fall and to go all in on which type of person you want to be and to not have shit.
