Eccentrics

Aside from having a pet moose that died from falling down stairs while drunk, Tycho Brahe had several other eccentricities that may have interfered with his potential for even greater success than he afforded himself in the field of astronomy.  Brahe had a firm grasp of parallax - that phenomenon that makes the tress next to the freeway while you’re driving seem to go by fast while the ones in the distance seem to barely move - which helped him develop a model of the solar system a step in the right direction away from the Ptolemic model and towards the more accurate Copernican one.  Tycho, rather than settling a dispute as to who was the better mathematician between himself and a rival in a sensible way settled the matter with a sword duel, and one in which he lost the better part of his nose at that.  Though he accurately described the relative distances of comets and supernova he could not maintain he played fast and loose with women and alcohol, both of which a certain proverbial book warn sharply against.  His inability to maintain sobriety, in the end, was his downfall, as he imbibed far too much one evening and thinking it too rude to leave the festivities to relieve himself, died later indirectly from uremia.  Case in point:  while there is no harm, in fact, there may be much good in distinctions in personalities, eccentricities and idiosyncrasies carried to extremes may not only inhibit success, they may lead to death.