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Comment by jl2718 | Hacker News Reader

Irresponsible sanguine BS. Path dependence is huge. Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems: these things can knock you out of the “high-achiever” game very quickly. Comebacks are rare and you can’t go back to being “high-potential”. This game has less to do with ability than mass psychology, like stock trading or politics. Hardships are a nice flair to your success story, but only if they come before stepping into the competitive part of the pipeline, or after you already made it out. The middle is brutal and unforgiving.

The other option is to get out of that game, stop living in the cult of personality, and focus your life on exchanging money for direct value to the customer ( i.e. indiehacker). This seems much harder than peddling a resume in exchange for salary or investment or a professorship or whatever.

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So what would the "responsible" message be, in your book? "If you get unlucky and have bad boss, family problem, health problem, etc, too bad, sucks to be you!"?

Cause trust me, people who have bad stuff happen to them already know it sucks.

This is a good point. I don't know. I suppose there are two options: 1) stick with it 2) do something else. I have heard of cognitive biases in both directions, and I don't know which is generally stronger* in most people. Probably the best advice is to seek better advice from someone that knows what it takes to win.

*You could probably study this with outcomes of job switching and divorces. I'm not sure how though...

Do something else is great advice.

My manager was a great people manager and would generally rank high in terms of emotional intelligence (imo), but getting into details and weeds was not his strength.

When the problem we are trying to solve requires a decision maker to remove abstractions and deal head on with complexity, he would do the opposite. He would avoid the tough conversations - Every. Single. Time.

My boss saw his reports (me specifically in this case) as the abstraction. It removed complexity from his plate and made his job easier, but honestly, his poor decision making set me up to fail. I did my best, but when it was clear that I need management support and I won’t receive it, I had no other choice.

I left. :)

The responsible message would to report the study accurately and not suggest that the experience of scientists writing grants is broadly applicable to everyone.

"Family problems, leaving school, bad boss, bad partner, spiteful interviewer, health/injury problems"

Ruthlessly competitive people are affected by all of those things. But because they're ruthlessly competitive, they usually won't allow those things to set them back.

Now, you don't have to be ruthlessly competitive, but you should at least be aware that other people are, so don't think they'll be set back by the same things that set you back.

I actually thought it was weird OP mentioned those things, even when they are exactly prime example of the people the article and many of us are talking about.

You see them, for example, at College/University (in my country, at least): They are single and have to keep their parents so they have to work at the same time as they study; or they have families so they have to go to night/weekends school and they manage to overachieve and graduate while working and having that family; I have a friend with short arms, like a T-rex, and he works right next to me (he sets up his own environment so it’s more ergonomic for him), and he goes to parties, drinks, plays soccer with us and he has a family.

My own experiences are not that... how to say it, bold, but I have my fair share of setbacks, but when you see these people, and while they are not the majority, at least here in my country you see a lot of them. Some of us suffer health or family problems, but at some point you realize that's life and simply try to tackle such issues however you can while keeping sanity. The first examples I mentioned... I don’t know how they do it, but I guess that’s what the article is trying to say.

I actually agree with this. You can steamroll a lot of problems if you never depend on other people for anything, truly don't care about people that need you, and can't be distracted from your mission.

However, it seems this not the typical "high-achiever" game of institutionalized low-risk resume and relationship building. This is the high-risk "ultra-achiever" game of household-name superlatives like Jeff Bezos, Floyd Mayweather, and the like.

Of the people I know personally that made it big as entrepreneurs and athletes, it was a major setback that started their success by knocking them out of a game they were losing. They were the ones that could let go of it and do something else, over and over. Others with the same setbacks ended up dead.

On the other hand, they do give you perspective and help you realize that maybe being "high potential" isn't all its cracked up to be.

Anyone can experience hardship. Resilience is a powerful force to overcome it. It doesn’t solve all problems obviously, however a growth mindset[1] is still invaluable.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth

"If everything did not go perfect at the start, you're hosed for good." Sounds like a real winning mentality.

If your idea of success is of the unicorn-flavored, Elon Musk, startup/VC-world kind, then it's pretty much true.

So not being a billionaire is failure? Wow.

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