The original posts which prompted this one was centering around the super-engineer who can control their own destiny and work for any company they want. Nothing in this post applies to the average engineer.
Then, there are the social factors. Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way, though you might say they are more manageable than intelligence and health.
Growth mindset, beyond the "bloody obvious" [1] interpretation of it, is not something you can state as self-evident, and evidence to support the stronger interpretations is quite scarce.
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...
You have added a whole load of random obstacles to our average engineer, like making him in poverty, setting him the goal of greatness and suggesting he's sick.
I'd agree that he probably need to find a job that pays better, get well and have smaller goals before he succeeds.
Biology is overrated. From "You and Your Research"[1] by R.W. Hamming:
"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, 'How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, 'You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!"
Other anecdotes lead me to believe the primary difference between those that are and those that might have been is hard work.
> You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects.
Bad health is a rough deal for anyone. But it is possible to succeed in the face of it. Look at Goddard[2]. There's a good argument that he didn't reach his full potential because of his health, but he still did some truly great rocket science.
> Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way
Rather than get in the way, I think they are often essential. I imagine it must be hard to do great things if you're personal life isn't in good shape.
There are real obstacles to "greatness", I think. Things like access to education and financial security. But I find it hard to believe that biology, health, and domestic life are enough to stop a dedicated person from performing great feats.
[1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
If you're already a good engineer, then it's much more likely that you can become a great engineer. I'm still not convinced that every good engineer can become a great engineer. Maybe most? I know that I have a memory-related lack of attention to detail that I've never been able to get rid of entirely, regardless of adherence to lists and standards and specs and so on. I basically can't maintain an event-driven workflow and it causes problems. I've gotten around it by going into mathematics and programming, which are relatively stateless, but I can easily see myself reaching "good" engineer status but not "great" engineer status.
I've largely dealt with it by moving into CS theory and AI (which have less of that) and by using Google's reminders system (inbox, now, keep) to deal with the remainder. Just, whenever I have to do engineering, it's always going to be more difficult for me, and since I'm damn good at math there's no real reason for me to focus on engineering beyond the level where the other things I'm doing don't take hits from it. And unless I manage some kind of transformative pivot or redefinition, it'd be pretty stupid for me to focus on being a great engineer, and I'm not sure I'd be able to. I certainly am never going to be as good an engineer as I could be a computer scientist.