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Comment by jgilias | Hacker News Reader

The Twitter thread explores some ideas why this may be the case. However, quickly skimming through it, they miss the most obvious one.

For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. So there's no 'willingness' really to it, it's just that status doesn't really exist. The way they see themselves and how they measure their success has literally nothing to do with what perceptions other people might have about them. And then, sure, eventually some of them end up being pretty successful also by other people's standards.

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> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing.

I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all.

I read a number of biographies of great US presidents in the last year, and found it fascinating to see that pretty much all of them were intensely ambitious. What made the difference is that they ultimately cared more about the people they served than about serving their own ego.

> I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn't the same as saying they didn't care about status at all.

Agree. I refer to this as meaningful work. It can be difficult to describe to others why it is important, but it is important to them at that time.

The joy of such work is that status does not weigh upon it as much as other endeavors. I suspect some of this success reverse-engineering efforts sometimes runs ramshod over non-extrinsic motivations because they're not as apparent, especially to the authors of such pieces.

Whose biographies did you read and what else did you learn from this study? Sounds like a fun adventure

Started with Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Leadership", which is a 4-in-1 biography of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. I cannot recommend it highly enough! (Here's my more detailed write-up: https://terranostra.one/posts/Review-Lessons-from-the-Presid...)

Then went on to Ron Chernow's "Washington" (another great book), and am currently on Jean Edward Smith's "FDR".

If you're interested in presidential biographies, have a look at this guy's page: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/

Humans are social animals, so status regardless of what you’re working on is most certainly a thing.

Unless you’ve reached enlightenment through concerted practice, status will still be a topic that concerns you.

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