Seems like most of the comments are focusing on the happiness angle, but I am liking the framework that some people are good at solving poorly-defined problems.

It makes me think of people who have huge impact and success in life, with little obvious explanation. People like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, etc. People to whom a lot of success is attributed, but it’s hard to say exactly, specifically, what skill or task they did to get it.

There’s a joke that Steve Jobs “invented the iPhone,” which is funny to people who are familiar with how products like the iPhone are actually created. But on the other hand… Steve Jobs definitely did something that was important to the creation of that product. Maybe it’s enough to say it was a poorly defined problem, which is why it’s also hard to define exactly what he did to solve it.

I also think intelligence itself is a poorly-defined problem, and AI will help us define it. I think this essay leans in that direction by recognizing the distinction between predictive intelligence (which AI is good at), vs a less-easy-to-define mental facility that defies prediction. Or maybe precedes prediction. Like if I want tacos for dinner, I can use my intelligence to navigate the problems necessary to get tacos. But can I reliably predict what I’ll want for dinner? Seems a lot harder.

What people want, vs what they do to get it, are probably a distinction similar to poorly-defined problems and well-defined problems, respectively. If you can figure out what people really want, well, that seems like a huge step toward being successful. But hard to define.

“Musicians play their instruments, I play the orchestra.” – Seiji Ozawa by way of Steve Jobs by way of Aaron Sorkin

“I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” – “Frank Costello” by way of William Monahan by way of Martin Scorsese

I think humans have a deeply rooted inner sense of how much our destiny lies within our own hands, subject to our own will. That’s in some part a matter of intelligence, surely, but as social animals it’s also dependent on a dynamic set of emotional, historical, economic, political structures and our ability to navigate them, much of which is likely not directly aligned with success in mathematics or French.

> Steve Jobs definitely did something that was important to the creation of that product.

I had this discussion in the past with an Apple fanboi. After our very long discussions we concluded that the central important thing with respect to which Steve Jobs made the difference was that Steve Jobs was an exceptional marketer - but nothing more.

There is often a “middle of the bellcurve” effect where being exactly average means you have the highest possible number of people who think like you do.

That has obvious advantages with things like marketing and identifying what people want.

Then of course you have a million other traits like work ethic and being a sociopath which can grease the wheels of success.

You're kidding that it's hard to attribute which skills made Donald Trump successful, right? Born rich, lies and steals in business dealings is all there is to it.