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>I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work

Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports.

From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online:

>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.

https://sabr.org/journal/article/can-stephen-jay-goulds-theo...

On the other hand football has seen two of its best players ever (Messi and Cr. Ronaldo) just break all sorts of records until very recently, with Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.

Football (and most other similar sports) offer more chances for creativity and variation than batting in baseball. Hitting a baseball is a very narrow and defined task with limited room for novel development or breakthroughs. Unless there are significant rule changes in baseball we're not going to see any batters revolutionise the act of batting in any meaningful way.

Getting a ball past several defenders and scoring a goal on the other hand can be done in a near infinite number of ways, meaning there is much more room for variation, improvement and evolution.

The closest equivalent I can think of in football is a penalty kick, and I don't think there is any evidence that players are getting significantly better at scoring off penalties.

> Football (and most other similar sports) offer more chances for creativity and variation than batting in baseball.

I agree, with the caveat that football is becoming more and more like baseball and other similar (mostly US) sports which are very heavy on numbers and on stats. The recent Norwegian sensation, Haaland, seems exactly to fit that trend, as he's not particularly super-good at anything but his numbers have just been phenomenal in the last 3-4 years (when he's been fit to play, that is).

We'll see if the future will bring more Kevin De Bruyne-type of players (i.e. a very creative guy) or more Haalands.

Football has intentionally changed to become a more attractive sport.

Mostly by cracking down on violent play and letting forwards use their skills without being injured.

Messi is 35 and Ronaldo is 37. They emerged 20 years ago. The closest talent that the current generation can offer is Mbappe, and he is more one dimensional than either. Can you name someone else under age of 20?

However, watching any random league game from the big five (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France), the standard is very high. Most players are amazingly fit and skillful, control ball extremely well. Teams play with cohesive plans. A lot of nice team movements. It shows that the standard at the professional level has risen considerably in the last few decades.

The downside of course is that it makes games more mechanical and less emotional, and it's harder to tell one team from another.

> Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.

There is no such thing. Being considered by many, yes.

Erling Haaland is younger than Mbappe.

It may seem like football hasn't changed but just think of the overall improvements in training, fitness, nutrition, sports medicine... Nevermind changes to the way matches are officiated and even in some cases the rules have changed. And the pitches! Imagine some players from the past playing on today's laser-levelled pitches where the length of the grass is mm perfect (and specified in the manager's contract!) instead of puddles and patches of bare dirt.

I would put Ronaldo above Messi purely because he's demonstrated elite status in a variety of scenarios compared to Messi who spent most of his career at a team that was built around feeding him (and once he left, he has not performed anywhere near as well.)

And so did Tennis with the top 3 (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic) dominating the sport over 15 years

> Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things.

This is based on hearsay, but there's a fairly common sentiment surrounding certain big tech companies that they'll often hire highly skilled engineers to work on fairly mundane problems in order to restrict the available talent pool. Sometimes large companies will acqui-hire full teams just to avoid having to compete with them. Which is to say: I'm not sure that the allocation of talent is in an optimal configuration. But I'm also unsure how this hypothesis could be adequately falsified or measured.

"Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things."

I'm not sure I agree with that...

They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...

That's tech monopolies (FAANG etc.), which have more money than sense. In the normal businesses, there's hardly any busywork, because the relatively low margins don't allow for it.

I agree with you, ambition isn't the limiting factor. YC has so many applications, I wonder how they review all of them.

Might there not just be a semantic issue here? Unless I'm mistaken you seem to be equating ambition with doing very well at something, such as successfully climbing a corporate ladder. And that's an absolutely reasonable ambition that's also more attainable than ever, as you mentioned. But I think Paul Graham was speaking of ambition in terms of revolutionary or world-changing type stuff.

For instance in a parallel world Elon Musk ends up going to work at Boeing and perhaps even gradually works his way up to becoming their chief engineer. But in this world it's unlikely he would have even been able to create fully reusable rockets. That was not only an expensive and extremely high risk venture, but one which many key people, such as Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA - a Boeing/Lockeed partnership), were aggressively dismissive and even mocking of, until SpaceX proved it. Let alone all his other ventures like Tesla or big picture goals like creating human colonies on Mars.