Stephen Wolfram

And leadership is intimately tied to ego.

Now, what does it mean?

For me, I've been fortunate that I think I have reasonable intellectual confidence, so to speak.

That is, I'm one of these people who at this point, if somebody tells me something and I just don't understand it,

My conclusion isn't that means I'm dumb.

My conclusion is there's something wrong with what I'm being told.

And that was actually Dick Feynman used to have that feature too.

He never really believed in it.

He actually believed in experts much less than I believe in experts.

Wow.

Sort of being confronted with- Sure, there are mistakes I've made that are the result of

I'm pretty sure I'm right.

And turns out I'm not.

I mean, that's the, you know, but the thing is that the idea that one tries to do things that, so for example, you know, one question is if people have tried hard to do something, and then one thinks, maybe I should try doing this myself.

And if one does not have a certain degree of intellectual confidence, one just says, well, people have been trying to do this for 100 years.

How am I going to be able to do this?

And I was fortunate in the sense that I happened to start having some degree of success in science and things when I was really young.

And so that developed a certain amount of sort of intellectual confidence that I don't think I otherwise would have had.

And, you know, in a sense, I mean, I was fortunate that I was working in a field, particle physics, during its sort of golden age of rapid progress.

And that kind of gives one a false sense of achievement because it's kind of easy to discover stuff that's going to survive if you happen to be, you know, picking the low-hanging fruit of a rapidly expanding field.