Chess is probably the clearest example of this. Chess is not especially difficulty to become quite strong at - even as an adult. But there is an important catch

Chess is probably the clearest example of this. Chess is not especially difficulty to become quite strong at - even as an adult. But there is an important catch there. Your improvement is nonlinear and difficult to predict. You can spend 6 months working tirelessly at the game and see no improvement. One extremely typical pattern in it is 'stair stepping.' You don't gradually increase in proportion to your efforts, you instead go up in spikes. You wake up and suddenly you're e.g. 100 points stronger than you were than when you went to bed. This goes all the way to the top. Magnus Carlsen is currently the world champion, one of the most dominant we've had in a long time, and arguably the strongest player to ever live. And he had phenomenal success. He achieved his grandmaster title at age 13 and was nearly the youngest grandmaster ever. But here's [1] what's interesting. That's a graph of his rating progress - a much more readable table is at the bottom. Carlsen was advancing meteorically rapidly. Looking at his relative rating gains between each period: --- 10/2001: Baseline (2072) 10/2002: +178 10/2003: +200 10/2004: +131 Then, as always, it happens: 10/2005: -11 --- A player meteorically rising and spending immense amounts of energy on the game suddenly manages to achieve nothing but an 11 point loss over more than a year. Imagine if you, as an adult, were in the position and in spite of all your efforts over the past year - you did nothing but lose 11 points. I've coached people in that exact situation. And they tend to rapidly give up. Oh, they just don't have the IQ for it. Maybe they're too old. Maybe they're doing something wrong and start engaging in genuinely wrong study habits. And so on. These 'plateau' type events happen to literally all chess players. So it leads to the interesting thing that you'll find most chess players are both humble and arrogant. Humble as years of sport against much better players (as is required for improvement) will make you, but arrogant in the sense that they will never say never - even when things look incredibly grim. In effect you end up simultaneously humble and arrogant. I would expect that successful entrepreneurs and successful chess players share many of the exact same characteristics, as it's the same game in both endeavors. [1] - https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014 https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014