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You cannot understand what it means to be relentless until you have struggled to possess something that’s just out of your reach. Over and over, as soon as you touch it, it moves farther away. But something inside you—that killer instinct—makes you keep going, reaching, until you finally grab it and fight with all your might to keep holding on. Anyone can take what’s sitting right in front of him. Only when you’re truly relentless can you understand the determination to keep pursuing a target that never stops moving.
The terrorists of today and tomorrow may no longer have to worry about struggling to obtain access to controlled pathogens and biological agents from government labs. With the advent of synbio, they can just download the genetic sequence blueprints and print these deadly viruses themselves. The full-length genetic codes of some of the world’s deadliest pathogens including Ebola and Spanish flu are freely available for download in the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s DNA sequence database.
Future Crimes
Marc Goodman
Nearly two centuries later, psychologist Dean Simonton has gathered research supporting Quetelet’s early observations: the most accomplished scientists, artists, and scholars are also those who produce the most. Simonton explains that across many domains, personal productivity and social creativity are highly correlated. If we look at the pattern of creativity across an individual’s career, Simonton argues, the periods when a person produces their best work also tend to be the periods when they produce the most work. Measuring the number of highly acclaimed works and dividing them by the total can produce a kind of quality ratio. “This ratio of hits to total shots does not change in a regular pattern with age,” Simonton explains. “The ratio neither increases nor decreases, nor exhibits any other form. This remarkable result suggests that quality is a function of quantity.” Simonton proposes an “equal-odds baseline,” which suggests that, once a person begins contributing original work to their field, every attempt has roughly equal potential for world-changing impact.
Get Better at Anything
Scott Young
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