from painting to nuclear physics to terrorism to investing to golf to plumbing to surfing, is about 90 percent a matter of social skills, 9 percent a matter of discipline, and 1 percent to do with anything else at all.
Your social skills absolutely, entirely, completely, and fucking totally determine your success or failure in the world at anything, no matter what/where/when/why it is. Everything is social. Every . last . fucking . thing . in . heaven . and . on . Earth .
It is absolutely humanity’s loss, in a way, that the 99 percent of all that is great in some way but never championed by an agent with tremendous social skills will never see the light of day, forever trapped in a non-social-butterfly’s writing desk, bedroom, or car trunk. But it is also the nature of humanity, the thing that makes the development of the cognitive and resource infrastructures upon which these depend possible in the first place.
Without the social, none of this develops. With the social, most of what develops as a result of the social will be excluded because it is not sufficiently social. But that’s life.
What will happen to those of us that were (as I was) a “prodigy kid” lauded by all, but that never really developed the incredible set of social strategies, tactics, awareness, and comfort to carry it into the realm of the public and of the various social networks?
We will grow some potatoes in our gardens, put some magnets on our fridge, produce great stuff in our heads and on little notebooks that we keep in drawers and that will then be thrown away when we die.
Hollywood, Wall Street, and Washington are no accident. They are the very nature of humanity, in all their utterly corrupt, unfair, and highly social glory.