Here is an unsurprisingly excellent conversation between Paul Graham and Tyler Cowen.

You can read lots of commentary about this interview elsewhere; what particularly struck me, however, has been mostly passed over:

Cowen: You’re clearly good at boosting ambition, so you’re pulling on some lever, right? What is it you do?

[some discussion]

Graham: There is a skill to blowing up ideas, blowing up not in the sense of destroying, like making them bigger. There is a skill to it, to take an idea and say, “Okay, so here’s an idea. How could this be bigger?” There is somewhat of a skill to it.

Cowen: It’s helping people see their ideas are bigger than they thought.

It’s compelling and plausible, to me at least, that there is a big part of ambition that consists in having a more accurate view of what it is you’re trying to do. Failing to be ambitious is, on this view, more of an intellectual failure, and less of an emotional one, than is commonly thought.

Compare creativity. I’ve long thought that views of creativity centered on “sparks of inspiration” are overrated. What we think of as “creative” results often come out of a deep knowledge of a subject in remarkably straightforward, even algorithmic, ways. I’m sure that other factors matter also (being in a certain state of mind, perhaps having certain kinds of nonconformist disposition). Still, though, stories of real-world creativity tend to have much more to do with a deep understanding of a subject than we often admit.