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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

Mohamed let me tell you about my little sister. She was the opposite of me in that she hated school. Truly hated it. She said she'd never set foot in school again after graduating high school.

But, she wanted to be a police officer, and that required college. So she put herself through school by being a prison guard. My little 5'3" sister running around bossing grown men like it was nothing.

She made it through school and got hired as a police officer. She spent the next five years as a dispatcher. Nobody wanted to put her on the streets. But she persevered and eventually she won the day and became a patrol officer. I dare say except for getting married it was the happiest day of her life.

Don't let anything stop you, man. Smart isn't everything: perseverance counts for a great deal.

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Thank you. The fear of starting anything worthwhile is enormous. So many insecurities spring up when people decide to act on something. Such things as: am I good enough to do this? What will people think of me? I don't deserve this, and so on.

I am really happy for your sister and the many other people who just push every day to get up, not feel sorry for themselves and make it work. Thank you for the encouraging words.

I've got plenty smarts, but how about some of that perseverance. I'd love some more of that. I do great work but very sporadically.

>My little 5'3" sister running around bossing grown men like it was nothing.

There's nothing strange or unusual about that.

Great story expect the last part. Where you're sort of implying that all smart people are coders and others that do other types of jobs aren't.

I met a lot of people that were a lot smarter than most "startup developers" and it didn't require them to sit in front of a computer most of the day.

I read it as, one can be smart, but the drive and perseverance to pursue your dreams and desires are really a major key to achieving one's goals.

The major key. Hard work and perseverance can make up for just about any deficit in natural ability, but it doesn't work the other way around.

Eh, this'll end up being a metaphysical debate, but I think that's much too strong.

If someone is of average or higher natural ability, yes, hard work and perseverance will be the biggest determinant of outcome. But someone who's genuinely pretty dumb, wholly socially incompetent, or exceptionally disabled or ill will have massive difficulties being successful regardless of their perseverance.

Which isn't to say that hard work is useless to the people on the lower end of the spectrum: far from it, a stupid hard-worker not only can find themselves with a decent enough job but will usually be able to keep it. It's just they lack the ability to set themselves up for good opportunities like that and to limit downside risk from one-off events. Luck of the draw will end up dominating outcomes.

(Obviously, most people who comment on internet forums, particularly a specialized forum like HN, are not only likely to be average or above but also to have extremely limited contact with people significantly below the mean, so if you're reading this, your life outcomes probably are determined by your own work ethic. On that note, cheers to a productive Sunday!)

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.

Sometimes also known as grit:http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/books/review/how-childr...

I'm not certain he meant to imply a divide between smart people and non-coders, I think he was referencing Mohammed's comment that people here were very smart people and that he felt out of place in them. To which the parent of your comment responded that it's okay to not be the smartest person, as long as you have perseverance.

It's not easy to tell how smart someone is by meeting them. That tends to bias you towards social abilities. IQ tests help to level the field by testing abilities that we can't easily observe just by knowing someone. Not that IQ tests are accurate at all either. But I just mean to say that feeling that someone is smart can just mean they're smart at appearing smart and may not have the same abilities at a broad range of thinking skills as someone with a high IQ.

I had a cab driver a couple of weeks ago. We got talking, and I said I am a developer. He said he knew some c#. He seemed slow but I humoured him - asked how he got into it. He then started talking about machine code programming on the c64 and showed an encyclopedic knowledge of the sprite system, the way to build event loops and different approaches to laying out large programs.

Cab drivers are really some of the most interesting people. I've spoken to a cab driver that claimed to have been a refugee from a country in Africa- told me how he missed how brightly the stars shone in comparison with the light pollution of the American city. He was a reporter that got in trouble with his government and had to get out.

Selection effect. You have much less occasions to chitchat with firemen, street cleaners, or farmers than taxi drivers.

That's pretty awesome! Reminds me of a conversation I had with my grandfather last year - he told me did a few years of programming on IBM mainframes with punch cards in his 20s, before switching and becoming an accountant.

Some people with high IQ are smart enough to say "I want to be a cab driver", and do it. They probably are happier in their jobs, than many others who just do whatever "is expected" of them.

Yes, and when what's expected is starting a start-up, you get HN crowd, where someone who never tried like me often feels that starting a start-up is really overrated here. For instance, I wouldn't bet a lot on Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg being much happier in their lives than your average immigrant taxi driver.

Relevant anecdote: I used to do some programming for my job, and have an incredible vocabulary and am fluent in Chinese; I'm extremely "smart". But, sbout a year and a half ago, I was in a terrible motorcycle accident in which I was knocked off by an SUV and went into a coma, suffering a massive amount of neural damage to various areas all around my brain. Unfortunately, because of this brain damage, it is now incredibly difficult for me to learn some new things (specifically the logistical complexities involved in programming or advanced math/physics, for example). Also, my short-term memory is now awful. Many a time, in recent months, I've figured out how to do some kind of little software trick on my PC or phone, but then I'll forget how I did it, and have to spend hours re-learning it. Am I not "smart" anymore? Conclusion: sometimes how you appear and the things you say can't completely represent one's capabilities. "Smart" is a very broad, and possibly ambiguous term.

Side note: have you tried memory systems like Anki (spaced repetition)? As I've gotten older, it's been a godsend: my ability to pick up memory on the fly is shot, but Anki helps a lot. You're in a different, unfortunate situation, but it's worth a shot.

Ha! That's actually how I feel all the time. Learning something new is hard. If I don't use it I start to forget it. I do have two degrees: Engineering and computer science. I always thoguht this was normal. Maybe I'm stupid and never realized it? Iwonder...

I was complementing everyone here when I used the word 'smart', not necessarily in terms of IQ level, but learned a great deal from them as I have been reading relevant startup threads on HN for the past year.

I agree. I consider some of the inmates I deal with day to day very smart when you want to understand their world, and they will be more successful than anyone else when the game is being played on their turf. Sadly, they have other "distractions".

huh? The story ends with her succeeding at being a cop, not a developer.

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