Or, perhaps a little less cynically, that it takes a long time for your work to reach a critical mass, but past that point many factors come into play that allow you to ship stuff at a much increased pace: your work has a much higher visibility, more people are willing to collaborate with you, you have easier acccess to grants, etc
This guy is an executive. He isn't "shipping" anything, and it isn't cynical to say that.
Engineers tend to think about these things as if the world is a meritocracy based on your individual contributions. But for a lot of famous people, 80% of their contribution comes from attaching their name to the management page.
I agree with you that none of this would be possible without the years of work he did to build his reputation. But people shouldn't feel bad just because a well-known person has lots of flash on their resume. This stuff accumulates at an unnatural rate.
Become Stanford professor > Get prominent job > show you're cool > Get invited to do things!
But I doubt his work rate and energy was any less before, just as you say, it's visibility. And very cool.
Maybe we should all be on the lookout for at least one career move, that gains us a relative boost in visibility, even at the expense of other desiderata.
But assuming we each perfectly knew how to set our attainable goals - full awareness of human ability to succeed beyond imagined limitations, counted - what a CV like this tells me, is that the benefits to oneself, but also the world at large, really only begin to accrue when it seems to my experience (my bro becoming prof, unusually late in career, but for good reasons in pursuit his own interests, before) should absolutelynot be considered a ultimate, terminus, goal.
What I say, could be said as "rest not on your laurels", but it is i think more profound than that. At l;east I think so: because one's value to others can massively multiply, if you seek beyond what you may first think you are working towards.
And, if your goal is for instance to be appointed a Stanford Professor, does your perspective on career, pace of work, the work you pursue in fact along your way to that goal, all of that actually change so much, when you look beyond that, and see the utility you should instead aim to be, afterwards?
When my dad taught me Squash (he was a well known, widely published, coach) he first taught me to swing through the stroke, much as golfers know how also. Not only is there a huge uptick in stroke confidence, when you connect cleanly in this way, and power, too, but he was teaching me to calculate the angle of incidence, through my body, and that gave me instantly greater understanding of the shot. Of the future arising from my objective. Sure i was very young, this was a first lesson almost, so it is hardly great insight into Squash technique. But is it not, applied, not great insight into technique in playing Life?
