Humans live by their creativity, not by devouring limited resources.
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we convert non-resources into resources. nothing into something. non-value into value.
Claude Shannon on creative thinking
http://www1.ece.neu.edu/~naderi/Claude%20Shannon.html
> A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas.
> Now what is it that shoots one up to this part of the curve?
> Those two [training/experience & intelligence] I don’t think are sufficient. I think there is a third constituent here, a third component which is the one that makes an Einstein or an Isaac Newton. For want of a better word, we will call it motivation. In other words, you have to have some kind of a drive, some kind of a desire to find out the answer, a desire to find out what makes things tick. If you don’t have that, you may have all the training and intelligence in the world, you don’t have questions and you won’t just find answers. This is a hard thing to put your finger on. It is a matter of temperament probably; that is, a matter of probably early training, early childhood experiences, whether you will motivate in the direction of scientific research. I think that at a superficial level, it is blended use of several things. This is not any attempt at a deep analysis at all, but my feeling is that a good scientist has a great deal of what we can call curiosity. I won’t go any deeper into it than that. He wants to know the answers. He’s just curious how things tick and he wants to know the answers to questions; and if he sees thinks, he wants to raise questions and he wants to know the answers to those.
an even more important component of productive geniuses is *integrity*/honesty. i think a lot more failures are caused by lack of integrity than lack of curiosity. also it looks like most young kids have plenty of curiosity before it's discouraged, but i don't know that most people *ever* have much integrity.
btw there's a rule of thumb that the square root of the employees (e.g. 10 out of 100) produce 50% of the output at businesses. i think it's way more skewed than that (an even smaller group producing even more of the output) when it comes to stuff like philosophy and science breakthroughs, rather than business output.