On "Knowing Too Much"

If you just follow along with what others are doing, then when they get stuck, you'll be stuck there too. — Professor Yitang Zhang

Over the years, having met so many great scholars and been through the ups and downs of starting a company, I've slowly come to a realization —

Not knowing too much about others' successes and failures is actually a kind of luck.

Because knowing too many "settled conclusions" can sometimes box you in. As Professor Yitang Zhang put it:

"You have to be able to think of what others can't think of. That's very hard.

...But if you don't pursue original ideas, it's hard to produce new results."

During the days that were, by worldly standards, hard times, precisely because no one paid attention to him, he kept his own perspective. In the years when Yitang Zhang was thinking intensively about the twin prime problem, the mathematical community held an authoritative workshop that reached a pessimistic conclusion. But Zhang only learned of the workshop two years later.

Through years when no one cared, he kept working on twin primes; he missed the workshop where "the mathematical world had already passed a death sentence," and so he was free to go on believing in his own path.

In science, this may be a universal truth.

Independent thinking takes hard-won courage, and it is also the freedom of not being boxed in.

Starting a company is the same.