"My point is not a self-pity fest, but to say that, from personal experience, I've learned there are physical factors that can limit one's effort. I think that

"My point is not a self-pity fest, but to say that, from personal experience, I've learned there are physical factors that can limit one's effort. I think that some people who have not experienced this, don't realize nor understand it." The physical factors you refer to limit ability, not effort. At the point where one is frustrated by limited ability, the person ideally refocusses their effort on resolving the problem: waiting for the proverbial storm to pass, requesting assistance of some kind, restructuring the problem to yield a workaround, or ultimately resolving to move in another direction. When your health issues are ascendant, do you not wait until they have passed before resuming work? Effort, in the larger sense, is as much about working smart as it is about working hard. Equating effort with exertion is simply folly. "It is part of what makes community essential to achievement." Communities naturally form around the implicit understanding that the community will work for the greater self-interest of the individual. If the community can't enable future effort from an individual through communal effort, the community will cut off that individual. People help people who help themselves. Communities have a greater capacity for achievement, but sorely lack the tolerance and insight of the individual. In fact, it is often through the "self-made man", through massive individual effort guiding communal effort, that great things are achieved. A community is unlikely to achieve such things purely under its own auspices. "The bootstraps are necessary, but they are no longer sufficient." In the short-term, bootstraps are sufficient, but none of us operates in a vacuum. In the long-term, neither individual nor community alone is sufficient. However, communities are incapable of adapting to rapid change. Families split, friends depart, empires crumble; the individual endures. If great things are to be achieved, it will be on the strength and agility of the individual guiding the community, not the other way round.