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I got a good letter today, Friday, August 23rd, 1996, from a young stranger named Jeff Mihalich, one would guess of Serb or Croat descent, who is majoring in physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Jeff says he enjoyed his physics course in high school, and got top grades, but "ever since I have had physics at the university I have had much trouble with it. This was a huge blow to me because I was used to doing well in school. I thought there was nothing I couldn't do if I just wanted it bad enough."

My reply will go like this: "You might want to read the picaresque novel *The Adventures of Augie March* by Saul Bellow. The epiphany at the end, as I recall, is that we shouldn't be seeking harrowing challenges, but rather tasks we find natural and interesting, tasks we were apparently born to perform.

"As for the charms of physics: Two of the most entertaining subjects taught in high school or college are *mechanics* and *optics*. Beyond these playful disciplines, however, lie mind games as dependent on native talent as playing the French horn or chess.

"Of native talent itself I say in speeches: 'If you go to a big city, and a university is a big city, you are bound to run into Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Stay home, stay home.' "

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To put it another way: No matter what a young person thinks he or she is really hot stuff at doing, he or she is sooner or later going to run into somebody in the same field who will cut him or her a new asshole, so to speak.

A boyhood friend of mine, William H. C. "Skip" Failey, who died four months ago and is up in Heaven now, had good reason when a high school sophomore to think of himself as unbeatable at Ping-Pong. I am no slouch at Ping-Pong myself, but I wouldn't play against Skip. He put so much spin on his serve that no matter how I tried to return it, I already knew it would go up my nose or out the window or back to the factory, anywhere but on the table.

When Skip was a junior, though, he played a classmate of ours, Roger Downs. Skip said afterward, "Roger cut me a new asshole."

I think of this quote sometimes. My strongest "cut asshole" incident was in "Pokémon Puzzle League" (née Tetris Attack), a game that is absolutely the single best head-to-head tetris-y game ever. Over months and months I battled against EB, and we were both so much better than the relatives I had started playing with that I couldn't even get the handicaps set to make fair matches with them. I usually had a slight edge over EB, with my reactive "speed-b***h" style able to frustrate his more sophisticated coup de grâce setup attempts.

I went to the retro game convention "Philly Classic" and just for kicks entered a tournament. I didn't think I would win, but thought I was playing at some kind of respectable level.

I got schooled in the first round by a player who get equally schooled in the second. (Admittedly the winner of that game went on to win it all, but still.)

I've heard similar anecdotes about how uncannily good this one set of navy sailors are at darts.

It's hard to get a feeling for how there really is professionalism in some things, and then an elite level above that. Especially because duffers and dedicated amateurs can do very interesting things in some contexts, and many pursuits you can get paid for might not require genius, just persistence and focus. (And sometimes it feels like experts get so wrapped up in the assumptions of their field that outsiders can't know if they're idiots or geniuses. And partially as a response to that, certainly we've see too much gut feel truthiness in too many parts of government these days, and there are places where we've seen that politics and diplomacy are skilled profession that require experience.)

(I also think of the book "The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master", and just the idea of journeyman in general, and where I am with all that. Certainly with AI able to provide such a sharp looking coat of polish to nearly any turd a human conceives of - it's a weird time. The telltales of quality aren't the same. The new expertise is judgement, clearly identifying what's good or bad - unfortunately being usefully judgemental has never been a strength of mine. (My nickname when my college a cappella group was staging auditions was "c'mon guys she wasn't THAT bad, right?" - a little ungainly but it fit.)