Comment by jonathanberger

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. "