Greatness v/s Reason
In his book, Zibaldone , Giacomo Leopardi describes how reason can be the enemy of greatness. The one line reason? “Few can be great unless they are governed by illusions.” The illusion often is (needs to be?) borderline delusional to achieve greatness. Can you actually land a man on the moon? Can you overthrow Newton's theories? You get the idea. Of course, there is a very thin line between that and arrogance. Reason can be a dampner too. If nobody else could do it, what makes you think you can? How could everyone, including so many smart guys, not have cracked it but somehow you can? These are sometimes humility driven reasons; but they are also perfectly logical questions that can kill the illusion. Vikram Bhat had this to say about the need for irrational optimism as a necessary condition for greatness : “A strict rationalist might start ten companies each with only a 20% probability of success but promising a 10x return on investment. But most of us can’t put o...