Comment by RyanMcGreal

This reminds me of Outliers when Gladwell talks about concert violinists.

"All of the violinists had started playing at around age five, and they all played about two or three hours a week during the first few years. However, around the age of eight, an important difference began to emerge in the amount of hours they each practiced. By age 20, the stars in the group had all totaled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives; the “good” students had totaled 8,000 hours; and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.

What the research suggested was that once you have enough talent to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works."

Being in Silicon Valley, I meet smart entrepreneurs all the time. Many of them come from places like Stanford. I think many pass the basic threshold of intelligence. In fact, this is more than passing considering that it doesn't take an elite education to create a good company IMO.

Obviously, not all these people succeed and so the other factor behind success is likely to be what you said: determination.

I think pg in his essays is saying something stronger, which is that determination is actually more important than intelligence.

And although I tend to agree, let me play devil's advocoate for a moment. "We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is determination."

A more important predictor of success could be, ambition. It's different from determination because with ambition you need to make it big, but with determination you just have to have it.

Determination is the wrong thing because to make a startup succeed you have to want it, but you also have to want to make it big.

In fairness, pg touches on this when he says, "I don't know if it's exactly right to say that ambition is a component of determination, but they're not entirely orthogonal. "