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Comment by matwood | Hacker News Reader

Good post, and exactly right. Look at anyone who 'wins' and you'll often see extreme habits. Athletes are easy examples to look at because they compete so directly and much is written about them. If you look at a Michael Jordan or a Tiger Woods you'll of course find talent, but also an unrelenting competitive drive that made them practice for hours and hours a day. Their practice schedules were/are not normal even for the professional athlete level.

There is a good quote from a forgettable rap song:

Losers make excuses, winners make it happen

The author of the blog post made it happen even if he wasn't aware of doing it at the time.

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As much as I support making it happen over making excuses, I sometimes find it a difficult distinction to make.

Jason's story hits home for me in many ways. I was also an overachiever in high school who came home at 10pm from gymnastics, did homework, slept 4 hours and did it all over again. I went to a super-competitive high school, stressed over my GPA to two decimal places, got into the top schools etc.

Looking back, I did it out of something that I can only describe as pure competitive drive. I did it because I had to do well. I was concerned far more often about being a winner than about identifying and achieving a particular thing that I really care about.

But winning felt good!

I seem to have forgotten that since I came to college. My mindset for the past three or so years has been "I don't compete with others. I'll figure out what's really important to me and I'll work hard to achieve that." The result? I haven't figured out what's important to me. I don't feel like I've been a winner in many things because I've allowed myself to think I don't care about winning at those things. For example, I have allowed myself to say "I don't really care about algorithms" and gotten Bs and Cs in algorithms.

I tell myself that blindly winning at the wrong thing for the sake of winning could make me unhappy in the long run, that I should slow down and explore and figure out some real goals first. Yet it sounds a lot like a lame excuse, and it's even more difficult to do when one feels that one is "falling behind" compared to one's peers.

My conclusion is still that simply making it happen may be too superficial. It was for me. A substantial question is what you want to make happen and why.

I faced this my senior year of college too. What drove me out of the rough was Dweck's Mindset. Get your hands on a copy if you haven't read it yet. The take-away for me was that the apathy I sometimes felt was a kind of scapegoat for avoiding situations where I could fail. Instead of increasing my effort when I was faced with the hardest problems, I decreased it by avoiding them. This reduces the probability of failure but also ironically of success as well, which tends to sting in the long run if you don't catch it.

Thanks a lot for the suggestion!

You've got a point apathy being a mechanism to avoid, or even rationalize failure.

I realized something else: that winning gives you ownership and confidence.

To use my previous example, If I had diregarded "interest" in algorithms and gotten stellar grades in algorithms classes just for the sake of "winning", I would come to be proud of how good I am at algorithms. I would become empowered, I would like the feeling, and I would like algorithms.

Wow - another gymnast on HN - that's awesome. It is definitely important to select meaningful goals, especially if you get caught up in competing with others. My main point was that for dreams to come true, you've really got to approach your life much differently than most people.

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