Even before today's internet the famous "geniuses" existed and what they were able to do was not achievable by the ("untrained" or "untalented") mortals. There are so many examples, but I'll take just one which is, as far as I understand, indisputable:
Knuth writes an ALGOL compiler for Burroughs in 1960.
"don claimed that he could write the compiler and a language manual all by himself during his three and a half month summer vacation. He said that he would do it for $5000." "it was taking mortal human beings 25 man-years to write compilers: not three and a half man-months." "The machine had 4080 words of memory." He did it. During the summer of 1960, receiving the computer time as the "third" (after the payroll tasks and when the people developing Fortran compiler didn't need a computer). "he had been working all summer from cards" (punched cards -- for this time a normal condition: he didn't have a terminal to "interactively" develop the program -- he had to punch the cards, one line per card).
Agree. Those were/are geniuses and it’s relatively obvious that us normals can but aspire to get there. This is healthy.
Modern social media has the insidious habit of surrounding you with hundreds of relative geniuses who one-by-one are totally achievable. But as a group they expose you to tens even hundreds of breakthroughs every day.
Individual breakthrough or achievement may have taken 6 months, but when you see ten of them per day you start to wonder why you can’t stack up.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/bobby-fisher-playing-50-opp...
"At age 20, Fischer won the 1963–64 U.S. Championship with 11/11, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament."
My programming favorite is definitely:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2856567
Knuth writes an ALGOL compiler for Burroughs in 1960.
"don claimed that he could write the compiler and a language manual all by himself during his three and a half month summer vacation. He said that he would do it for $5000." "it was taking mortal human beings 25 man-years to write compilers: not three and a half man-months." "The machine had 4080 words of memory." He did it. During the summer of 1960, receiving the computer time as the "third" (after the payroll tasks and when the people developing Fortran compiler didn't need a computer). "he had been working all summer from cards" (punched cards -- for this time a normal condition: he didn't have a terminal to "interactively" develop the program -- he had to punch the cards, one line per card).