Here's a thing I've noticed about achievement, in sports and e-sports more so than in business, but I believe the same applies. What separates the high achieve

Here's a thing I've noticed about achievement, in sports and e-sports more so than in business, but I believe the same applies. What separates the high achievers, apart from any basic talent and training, is a personality that doesn't experience the relevant kind of pain or discomfort that would discourage them from the task. For a lot of sports, that means overcompetitive asshole. For a lot of businesses, the same. That personality gets a lot of leeway to optimize towards linear goals. But then you go looking at certain niches and there is nuance. Sometimes it's endurance - masochism. Someone who runs ultramarathons, or repeatedly starts over a speedrun of a classic video game. Sometimes it's a poker player or day trader who can't feel the weight of moving around big stakes. There are many roles where the successful personality isn't the competitive narcissist. But in the specific case of small companies that get very big very quickly, they are prolific. And that's a point which helps me personally, since I know some things about my comfort zone by now and where the standard advice is going to fail. Only some people are numbed enough to simply "hustle" and succeed. For the rest it's more like a quest to find the right kinds of challenges, the ones that they are most likely to engage with at a high level. When they can do that, people call them a genius. But from their own perspective, it's ordinary, or only somewhat more painful than doing nothing. And this quality of personality matching a high level skillset runs throughout our fictional characters, despite Western society nominally engaging with beliefs of anyone being equally able to learn to do anything. I think we know this and turn our back on it because it uproots several of our major founding myths about society and its potential and whom we should support and how.