Thought of the Day: “Potential Genius.”
"Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single
thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed
to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and
articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some
practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete
research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no
one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our
students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why
we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we
subordinated every other obligation to follow it."
—W.A. Pannapacker (in this article)