If it was possible we would and we could all just sit back and crib each other's notes on life. But this has to come from within you. You cannot share willpower, dedication and ambition.
There's nothing else to it: it's not as if the knowledge isn't on the internet or in books for cheap...
You can mould yourself a more conscientious personality through your own ambition and the willpower you had to start with.
What you're talking about isn't a failure of willpower, dedication or ambition.
It's a failure of knowledge. It's a failure of knowledge of the resources that are available to them, and it's a failure to awaken from the Samsara of self-doubt.
Inri137's doing the Buddhist thing and trying to shake people awake. These are skills that you can acquire. Sure it's modulated by willpower, dedication, ambition, and some natural talent, but that's not the important part imo. To quote FDR, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Fuck fear.
You are right, but I didn't say that you couldn't acquire these skills. I was trying to be particular with my choice of words: "You can mould yourself [...through what] you had to start with".
"He showed me some of those tools, but what I really ended up learning was how to go about finding, building, and refining my own set of cognitive tools."
Sadly, he does not mention anything else about those tools (of his mentor at MIT), nor how he went about building his own set.
In life, you learn bit by bit from others(in person, through books, net, etc.)
Unfortunately,his post does not provide any real hard information, just good inspiration, which of course is nice.
Inri is talking about the conscientious personality trait [1]. This is highly correlated to success in school and in the workplace.
You may consider yourself a struggling student but often a struggle is needed for success. If you're doing this already then have faith that you are on the right path as eventually it will be borne out. My point is that you can learn a conscientious personality, and you can become smarter and stronger willed. Every human is born with some willpower. Every human is born with some intellectual ability. Intellectual effort and willpower are both cumulative. They are like muscles, simple exercise of them grows them.
I have never met a man or woman who has fulfilled their potential.