> From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to sign

> From my experience in the tech industry I can say with utmost confidence that "not smart"/"talentless" people who are determined and hard-working lead to significantly better real world results than geniuses who are lazy, unmotivated or overall not action oriented. This hit me especially hard in university, where I went from being "the smart kid" to suddenly encountering subjects where I could no longer get by with crunching on the evening before the test and instead needed to actually have a work ethic for studying long term. The same applies to programming or learning more skills - you might need to fail more times than someone has even tried to get good at something, whether that's fighting the compiler for a new language, or reading the same material and doing exercises in a book multiple times until the dots finally connect. > Be audacious. Most people who are talented or smart are scared of doing things. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s more often than not the case. As far as the article goes, though, I am very curious about this point. I've also seen this and have experienced it myself, for example when needing to message someone and ask about a thing or organize something without necessarily knowing the full picture. Personally, I'd say it's almost like anxiety, due to not knowing all of the variables and overthinking things, or even just wanting to be considerate and not waste someone's time on a social level... whereas in actuality working on the issue is almost always better than just ruminating. I've heard the expression of "You get what you ask for in life" and think that it holds true - if you want to make things happen in life, whether that's getting a promotion, getting a new job, or making progress on a project, you're unlikely to do any of those by just thinking about all of the details. Same with circumstances like running a business on some hackathon level code - that person is going to make money and eventually be able to refactor things, whereas someone else won't even launch while chasing the perfect codebase, the perfect landing page, the perfect mobile app or component library or tech stack. > Ask your naive questions. With the previous point in mind, this has been particularly hard, especially when you start worrying about what others will think of you for asking questions that might seem a bit basic. You should still ask them and get as many details as possible. That can be the difference between not asking the important stuff and wasting weeks of work to hit some roadblock way down the road, or asking a bunch of silly questions in a meeting, having someone scoff at you a bit, but ignoring their attitude and realizing that the way they want their auth system to work isn't realistic, bringing that up, and saving everyone a major headache after setting them back on the right path. Plus, in general it's good to make sure that everyone is on the same page and for taking notes, as the article mentions. On that note, do take notes whenever you can, maybe even have meeting recordings somewhere!