Brilliance and Bravery

This is something I got from listening to Kanye on Joe Rogan. At one point during the podcast, he said “If you mix brilliance and bravery then we can ignite something”.

I think it’s a confusing thought and I still don’t really understand it but for some reason it stuck with me. I think it might be because if you think about most feats people have accomplished that are genuinly difficult to achieve or impactful in what they do, it has been with a hint of those two things. Brilliance comes with figuring out what to try to do, or how to do that hard thing. Bravery comes from actually having the balls to do it.

One guy that’s an example of this is David Blaine who I think is one of my favorite entertainers overall. I think that his goal of understanding the limits of the human body and trying to do things in terms of those limitations which people previously thought to be impossible, is just crazy. He’s first got to figure out how to do that thing and then actually have the balls to do it. Most of the things he does are real and not magic which is why he needs the balls. Another person I can think of here is J.K. Rowling who was rejected by so many publishers with her idea of Harry Potter. She was a single mother who lived off of welfare and still had the perseverance to realize her dream of this book which is where the bravery comes in. The brilliance is with the book itself.

I don’t really believe in any defining characteristics like this that make people particularly good at achieving what they want to but I do think there are slight patterns we can notice. I guess you can think of it as some high dimensional vector space which we are only viewing from the perspective of 1, 2 or 3 dimensions. Something that’s too hard to properly model.