I keep thinking of the quote ‘tanquam ex ungue leonem’, commonly translated as ‘you will know the lion by his claw’.
It means that you will recognise the relative skill of a person by the quality of their work, assuming you have some expertise.
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John Bernoulli was said to have uttered it when he examined a paper written by a young Newton.
But there’s also an interesting inverted application: when an expert reads something and scrunches up their face in disgust, you might want to probe further.
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1988 letter in Nature about this very phrase: nature.com/articles/33359
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A saddening implication is that many experts recognize that they will never get close to the All-Time Greats™.
John Milton suffered lifelong depression from his self-comparison with Shakespeare; Solieri went a bit insane each time he compared his music to Mozart's.
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Murray, Wawrinka, Safin, Hewitt knew/know they will never be in the same league as Djokovic, Federer, Nadal.
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Another perspective: the Mediocre can push the Good into to Great™ league to obfuscate their own mediocrity, "grade inflation".
I'm thinking of British & French commanders who got outwitted by Rommel. Rommel was good, but their losses were mostly of their own making.
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