Simon,

I thought that was an EXCELLENT post!

> My feeling is that the most successful
> people live in THIS kind of world.
> The world of super concentration and
> creative ignorance if you will.

I think that's true.... I know I've done it before in the past, and when I've been the most FOCUSED is when I've had my greatest successes....

But here's an interesting and relevant story....

About a week ago I was sitting in a cafe with some academically oriented friends.... There was also one other guy I never met before, but I got to know him. He's also an academic -- an expert in LINGUISTICS. Dr. Alan Libert from the University of Newcastle.

He shared with us this simple lesson.... HOW TO BECOME A WORLD EXPERT IN AN ANCIENT LANGUAGE, Paeonian. I liked this so much I wrote it down....

Paeonian is one of the most ancient languages we know about.... But there's a catch.

Only one word of Paeonian has survived. We know about it from one of the works of Aristotle.

The word is "monapos".

It means "European bison."

REMEMBER that, and you'll know as much as any other person in the world knows about the ancient Paeonian language.

You are now a WORLD EXPERT in Paeonian. :)

Don't forget to add it to your CV, under "languages"! :)

The point is by FOCUS you can become an expert.... While this example is a bit silly because there's so little of the language, there are other little-studied languages which we know very little about. If you studied one of those languages, you could become a world expert in it....

I'm probably one of the world experts in something called "entangled coherent states" -- one of the topics of my physics research. That's because I focused on that area, and made some contributions to its development. It's a field which is starting to gain interest from other quantum physicists....

Thanks Simon, I think what you've said is completely true! I know about it from my own experience (though I sometimes forget about it too).... Thanks for sharing it... :)

Cheers,

Dien