I was born the same year as this guy . How do I reconcile myself to the fact that I may never achieve so much even in my entire life ? Is it a matter of lowering ones expectations ? If this is the kind of brilliance it takes to succeed in the start up world I'm quite discouraged.
I too constantly feel that I should be more successful, and I'm pretty sure the feeling doesn't go away -- no matter what's achieved.
I think looking at others can be a useful gut check: am I working as hard as I could? Am I as focused as I'd like to be? But given that there's so much randomness and circumstance there too, it's a bad benchmark for anything.
(For what it's worth, the check I use personally is: "is there a difference between how those who know me best would describe me, and how I'd like to be?" Most of the time, I just try to fix those gaps.)
>> (For what it's worth, the check I use personally is: "is there a difference between how those who know me best would describe me, and how I'd like to be?" Most of the time, I just try to fix those gaps.)
^^^
If only I could up vote this many more times..
Please, let's all stop this cult of parenting, and cult of personality. Let's assume that Patrick and John had played with legos, and that their parents taught them programming. What would that teach us? That we should teach our kids Programming and let them play with legos? Certainly not.
Much respect to John and Patrick, I hope that they continue to do impressive things and that a few years down the road they'll look at the things they did in their 20s as 'merely setting the stage' for whatever else they'll be doing then.
Yep. Cargo-cult parenting, that's got to be a new one. I'm quite surprised at how people will latch on to the parenting as something to imitate. I'm sure it can be a factor but you can't assume that you will get identical results by cloning the procedure. Nothing good can come of that.
No, that kind of brilliance is not what it takes to succeed.
It doesn't hurt either, but the biggest factor is perseverance.
If you get discouraged because someone younger than you can succeed when you can't then that perseverance element is exactly what you have to work on.
For every Patrick and every John there are 10's of thousands of people that succeed. And almost all of them are not nearly as brilliant or as young. Imagine a world without them. In that world you would be closer to the top. But your chances of success would not be diminished, nor would they be decreased.
Now repeat that process for all those that are smarter, richer and more dedicated than you. At some point you'll be the one at the top. What would you blame it on if you then still did not succeed?
In the end, all that matters is when and how you decide to make a go of it, how much you apply yourself, how well you'll deal with the unavoidable hardships and how much luck you will have and how the timing will favor you.
It doesn't really matter how much higher than 120 your IQ is, plenty of people with less than that have succeeded at a level that even Patrick or John will never exceed simply by being in the right place at the right time and making use of every opportunity that life threw at them.
If you want to measure yourself do it with people that started off with less than you had and that still made it. Then figure out what they did right that you're doing wrong and go for it.
"[Julius] Caesar served in 63 BC as a quaestor in Spain, where in Cadiz he is said to have broken down and wept in front of a statue of Alexander the Great, realizing that where Alexander had conquered most of the known world at thirty, Caesar at that age was merely seen as a dandy who had squandered his wife’s fortunes as well as his own." [1]
IMHO you might want to reassess your idea of success.
Having a great family life, bringing up children, enjoying each day. Those are good measures of success.
One of Britain's richest people was a bum until he was 30 (and he did it all from scratch): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2h_GIP019c .. so you don't have to reconcile. Just be a late bloomer.
