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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

It is difficult deciding if this is inspiring or discouraging. The way you describe the Airbnb founders it feels like they had some intrinsic ability or talent. I think I have always viewed failure as not working hard enough, or smart enough, almost getting there but just not quite getting it right. Reminders that you may be failing because you might just not have ‘it’, and that no amount of work will get you there are kinda brutal.

I always think back to being 8 years old and running with my friends. Some kids were just faster, others were slower. No one was training or working at it, no one was reading up on techniques at night. Some kids were just better. Are most of us just the kids in the middle trying to be the fast ones? Is self-acceptance, tempering of expectations and emotional growth a road to happiness or the silver medal of people who were just not good enough?

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I’m confident there’s a way it can become encouraging.

Learning the skills (programming, design) to build an early stage web/mobile product is not hard; many many people already have done or could do that.

Equally, plenty of people can easily identify political or social problems that just need a confident and capable leader to drive reform.

The temperament/emotional side seems more innate and immutable, but only because broadly accessible ways of transforming one’s temperament are not widely known or deeply researched.

This is one of the main reasons I’ve gone so deep on the topic; beyond just the self-motivation of improving my own life, it seems like it could be quite significant if many more people in the world were able to overcome their inner obstacles and achieve better outcomes in whatever they were seeking to do.

Temperament definitely changes with age at least, the timescale for personality shifts is just so long that it’s difficult to manufacture or steer them.

> Are most of us just the kids in the middle trying to be the fast ones? Is self-acceptance, tempering of expectations and emotional growth a road to happiness or the silver medal of people who were just not good enough?

I used to race bicycles competitively, and our coach grilled into our heads: "It's you vs. the track. The other racers are just obstacles in your way. You are not racing them, you are racing yourself." I was a mid pack racer, but that mentality, of focusing on personal growth was huge.

You define success for yourself. And by your measure, others may be more successful on your own measure, but they are not you.

I'll also add the trite: "hard work will be talent if talent doesn't work hard." My brother was a natural racer, but he hated to practice and got beat by riders who were better conditioned all the time.

He never had to beat them, he just had to beat himself.

I agree but it’s also worth noting that you should also be able to step back and consider how much of your self worth you want to define by how fast you ride a bike. There’s good reasons to set goals and “beat yourself” but also good reasons to not worry about it too much and “accept yourself“.

Wasn’t that kind of op’s argument? You can focus on beating yourself all you want, if yourself isn’t the best, then you will never win the Tour de France.

If you don’t have the potential to win The Tour, then should you even be trying to? Sounds like a lot of effort, might wanna invest it somewhere else or redefine your cycling goals.

I run marathons and I don’t beat myself up about winning because I don’t have the potential to be a world class marathoner. Even if I trained twice as hard as Kipchoge. I just don’t have it.

Same with boxing. I train 4x/week because I enjoy the exercise and mental relaxation. Punching people in the face is fun. But I don’t compete because I don’t have the talent to make the pain of competing worth it.

But when it comes to writing software and running a business, you bet your ass I’m giving it all I got and want to “beat” (hard to define) everyone else. Because there I do have the potential.

What kind of bike racing was that? Because road racing is quite the opposite, the other competitors are everything while the properties of the course are just a minor influence on the all-defining question of which wheel to suck when. But those coach words are still wise and apply even there, if your goal is not to maximise winning but to maximise motivation and happiness (which would actually help winning long term, but the ratio between winners and losers is so bad in that game that you should focus on happiness nonetheless)

I think life is incredibly unfair, more so than people care to admit. Personality, disposition, early-childhood parenting, where you grow up, physical appearance, intelligence, family, surrounding, even country you're born all are determined outside your control. Yet these factors are what more or less determine how successful you are going to be.

The way I look at it, if you're posting on HN, you've mostly likely been dealt very favorable hands in grand scheme of things. So I try to be thankful for what I have.

For all each success stories like AirBnB, there are hundreds of not-so-successful ones with equally competent and gifted team. Luck plays a huge part.

Interesting approach and I feel the burn of this quite often. Peers of mine have much greater hands dealt and I've worked quite hard to get where I'm at... I get bitter sometimes because theirs nothing I could have done to set up greater nets for myself or anything like that.

The disparity of equality and seeing the top after coming from the bottom makes you realize just how unequal things are and how it might just never change and get worse.

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