"There is nothing Patrick is doing that most people on HN couldn't do" Sure if they applied themselves and put the effort in. Big "if" there though. In any ca

"There is nothing Patrick is doing that most people on HN couldn't do" Sure if they applied themselves and put the effort in. Big "if" there though. In any case I don't think Patrick falls into the "aw shucks" category at all. The post he did was long and detailed and I don't remember much (just rescanned quickly maybe I missed) about how he did it all and managed to still travel and have fun (he might have but I didn't see that). The sheer amount of detail in that post is great. I don't even have time to read it fully I can only imagine the effort that went into writing and editing. There is also this sentence at the end: "I think that, aspirationally, career/job/business/etc was never supposed to be my #1 priority, but be that as it may it sucked up a disproportionate amount of my twenties." So Patrick did what he had to do to make it happen, this is no "boating accident" (it's a shark) and his success is the result of hard work. Not everyone has what it takes to do that. (I'm reminded of the Karate tournament that I was in when I was younger where I was absolutely blown away by opponent who clearly had put way more effort into preparing than I did.) I'm not sure all, or even that most, HN'ers could achieve that because while they may be smart and they may read and learn everything they can they might not actually be good at applying that information, taking chances, having other things in their life suffer etc. or just plugging away.