Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there. There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the

Highly successful people (like waaay outside the normal distribution) needed a reason to get there. There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way. Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose? Greed has a lot of history too. Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.