> Surrounding yourself with smart people you like to work with helps immeasurably.
I think this is one of the most important pieces of advice ever. Not many people are solo savants - almost everyone who is successful (in business, academia, life) is surrounded by other competent, like-minded people.
We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, and the romantic meme of the lone-wolf superstar maverick needs to be put away.
Not just on an emotional level, I think when a bunch of clever people get together a sort of super brain is formed which is greater than each of them.
This is so since the super brain has the combined knowledge but not the combined biases of the individuals. To give an analogue this is like these comment threads where knowledge gets added and incorrect statements promptly and strongly refuted, but on a much much higher resolution when you work with a smart person face to face for a considerable length of time.
I think if you were to plot it as a graph it has a curve though.
Sure adding that 2nd smart person, the 8th smart person, etc., can add benefit and yield a whole which is greater than the sum of the individual parts in isolation. But once you are in the organization size range where you're adding a 500th person, a 10,000th person, then the organization almost always takes on other qualities and conditions: bureaucracy, slowing down, middle management, rules, paperwork, gossip, insulation from consumers/competition, groupthink, aversion to risk, and so on. And these qualities dumb it down. The "group brain" becomes much dumber than a smart brain when left alone and unfettered as an individual.
Google is a bit of an exceptional case where despite having on the OOM of 20k employees they don't seem to have quite succumbed to Big Dumb Company-itis. Surely they have some aspects of it, but they've tried hard to fight it and stay like a smaller/younger org.
I once dealt with a startup that was around 12 people and already I could see symptoms of Big Dumb Company start to manifest themselves.
I think this is one of the most important pieces of advice ever. Not many people are solo savants - almost everyone who is successful (in business, academia, life) is surrounded by other competent, like-minded people. We're all standing on the shoulders of giants here, and the romantic meme of the lone-wolf superstar maverick needs to be put away.