The way I evaluate a thinker, a philosopher, or an idea-generating person of any sort is that if he came up with 23 volumes of absolute rubbish and 5 brilliant sentences, I'm going to concentrate on the 5 brilliant sentences and gratefully make use of them.
People often do the opposite. If a person produces 23 volumes of genius stuff and 5 garbage sentences, they'll notice only those garbage sentences and spend the rest of their lives condemning her as a complete idiot.
They end up robbing themselves because undiluted, unblemished brilliance doesn't exist.
To the contrary (and this is very important): a person who is capable of producing brilliant insights will produce a lot of garbage, too. That's the default setting. The daring and the freedom that leads such people to come up with valuable new stuff also inevitably leads them to produce crap ideas. A scientist conducts dozens of failed experiments before getting a successful one done. It's part of the process.
There was a very notorious lecture by a guy from Azerbaijan recently where half of what he said was very nuts and the other half was supremely brilliant. The lecture was discussed for months, and I noticed that nobody seemed even to have noticed the brilliant part. People got completely fixated on the cuckoo stuff. Instead of deriving value from the good stuff, they concentrated on boosting their egos by condemning the rubbish. I mean, you spent time on listening to the lecture. Why not try to get something out of it? If you stop fixating on your ego for two seconds, you could gain something.
This is the same problem I talked about earlier this week. People get fixated on their egos, trying to milk them for things that egos are incapable of producing. That leaves then frustrated and unhappy.
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