I really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing. My takeaway is don't be afraid to put an unreasonable amount of time towards something.

It reminds me of PG's essay "The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius", which is like a hack on this idea. If you're obsessively interested in something, you're bound to spend an unreasonable amount of time on it.

Taking it even farther, there's a Revisionist History episode on the song Hallelujah, who's original version took over two years to write. The two components to "experimental" genius: time and iteration.

http://www.paulgraham.com/genius.html https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/hallelujah/

> People said I did the impossible, but that's wrong: I merely did something so boring that nobody else had been willing to do it.

I feel strong survivorship bias in this theme.

What about them, who embraced the grind, spent unreasonable amount of time, money and effort, but were not successful? Doesn't that look so obviously incorrect in retrospect that we make jokes about those people?

Wow, this was a great and somewhat eye-opening read. Thanks for sharing!