The entire idea that anyone can do anything they put their mind to is a lie. There are all sorts of path dependencies that limit what people can do.
And even physically, some things are just what they are. You can't escape death; you can't escape from a black hole, etc. You may claim these things may be possible in the future, but we are talking about what is currently possible.
But, the main way to understand the argument being made is: even if something is physically possible, if it is guaranteed that only say 10% people of people will achieve it, then you need to manage your expectations. It is exactly the same reason why gambling is a bad idea. In the aggregate, you are guaranteed to lose
A lot of grief arises because people ignore this basic concept. And, a lot of things in life are zero-sum: not all employees can be at the top level, otherwise that loses its meaning. Similarly, not all citizens can be president, not all people can be rich, etc.
These are the easy and obvious counters to your assertion that motivation is all it takes to be anything, but it is even true at most things. We like to believe that hard work is all that is needed to achieve anything you want, but any rigorous thinking and life experience will show this isn’t true. People have different skills and abilities, and some people simply don’t have the skills for certain things no matter how much they work at it.
Lastly, some of these things are simply numbers games. Every profession only has a limited number of opportunities, and some of these most highly desired ones are extremely limited. If there are two people who want to be the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, no amount of motivation is going to prevent at least one of them from failing to get the job. Even if both candidates had infinite motivation and infinite skill and infinite experience, only one of them can have the job.
So "success" looks like "changing the world". Doesn't it mean it can't be done! Just that it's gonna be hard.
not that this disproves your point per se, but, like... saying something can't happen because of rules is silly. Rules change all the time. The NBA example is better. But can a wheelchair-bound person end up professionally-good at basketball? Sure, maybe, in a future where medicine accomplishes a lot and they end up with bionic legs or whatever, plus they're incredibly driven to test those legs on basketball. Why not? The future can be anything.
I don’t think the ability to come up with an implausible scenario where a person could become the thing that seems impossible is the same thing as saying “if you have enough motivation, you can become anything you want”. Both scenarios you described require a lot of things to happen that you are not in control of; space flight changing significantly and colonizing mars aren’t something you can work at.
Also, the height limit isn’t just a made up rule, it is so you can fit in the spaceship.
For the wheelchair basketball player, they can’t just work hard and suddenly the NBA lets people on with bionic legs. That would require a major rule shift, which again is not something you can change through hard work and motivation.
Look, I get why we want to persist the myth that you can accomplish anything though hard work. You CAN accomplish a lot, and probably more than you think, through dedication and hard work, but you definitely can’t if you don’t believe you can. So, we tell ourselves (and others) that you can be anything if you work hard so as to encourage people to try for things they might not try for because they don’t realize they can accomplish the thing if they work hard. It makes some sense to try to delude yourself into thinking you can do anything in order to prevent the situation where you actually could have accomplished the thing you wanted to do, but you didn’t try because you didn’t think you could.
So I get it, but really, if you think it through… there are things out of your control that will factor into whether you can accomplish your goal or not, and you have to be prepared for that, too.
Basically: it is false that you can be anything in particular if you work hard enough. But it is true that the best way to act is as if that were true to some degree, because the outcomes are better for everybody.
I just think you shouldn’t conclude that you just didn’t work hard enough if you don’t achieve every dream. As Captain Picard put it, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life."
What would make us think the same thing isn't true of mental activities? Obviously there's a lot more noise in the signal, and it's a lot more subjective, but there's pretty much 0% chance that if anyone just "tries hard enough" they can become a genius.
My empiric objection is simply to watch this video. Everything here is objectively true: