That was an interesting way of sidestepping the question. If someone is born retarded, could they become a Steve Jobs just because they really wanted to and worked real hard at it?
However, that rarely matters as much as it's emphasized. The more you focus on something, the more brilliant your end results will seem.
Next question: how do you determine whether you're born with it? At what point does your demonstrated ineptitude force you to admit that you are incapable of realizing your goals?
("you" doesn't refer to you specifically, obviously. I just talk in the active voice.)
However, if you give up, you'll never know if you could have been. The struggle is what makes it so hard, but it's what makes it worth it in the end.
Not all of the YC startups that failed have failed just because the founders stopped working on them, I'd imagine. At what point should you let failure overwhelm you?
I'd bet that most of the failing YC founders learned important lessons from their failures. Nobody succeeds every time.
The problem is, it is not at all a foregone conclusion that you will become one of the greats just because you throw most of your life at it. Should a retard give up on his life's goals sooner, later, or ever?
Not to mention: as you go for it, you find better and better people along the way.
It's hard not to be devilishly jealous of their towering talent, though. Also, I'd imagine it would be extremely hard to earn their respect, so it they would be hard or impossible to find, or to keep.
You bring up a really interesting point. To me, doing the work myself matters more than realizing the vision. I never knew that about myself before, so thank you.
How disciplined are you? Everyone values genius, welcome to the crowd. It is a convenient excuse to obsess on others' talent as if genes and childhood were all that separated you from them. You appear to be focusing too much on outcome rather than on the hard work necessary to achieve it. Skills always look natural from the outside! But ask the honest, reflective people you admire and they'll tell you: they worked their butts off on fundamentals. Psst: fundamentals are open to you too.
Don't obsess over shortcuts. I would love to see you explain to a person with no arms how you'd gladly cut yours off for slightly better gray matter.
Practice with intense effort. If forum composition and wordsmithing is a challenge, discipline your technique by journaling stream-of-consciousness. To improve your memory treat it like a muscle: high reps, low weight at first.
How is your health? Do you exercise, eat right, avoid alcohol, have a positive attitude and sleep well? These are simple but powerful levers.
Talent is overrated. Upgrade your attitude not your physical brain, silly. :)
I'm not really sure that intelligence matters as much as people think it does. K.A. Ericsson is a psychologist who studies expert performance, and he's clearly shown that a high iq is not required to become an expert in something. What is required is 1000's of hours of deliberate practice. So basically when you see overnight successes, you're really missing the hard work that got them there. Everyone needs to put in the effort.
And besides research is coming out that really supports the idea that intelligence can be raised. There is some evidence that practicing the Dual-n-back test will raise your fluid iq. And the test isn't domain specific. http://cognitivefun.net/test/5 is a good site for the test.The community there is also really good.