I’ve known a fair number of very successful people, and the strongest theme among them is ignorance of the challenges they had committed themselves to, perhaps even a stubborn disability to heed warning that there is yet another layer of the onion after years of peeling. I really don’t think it’s some kind of dreamer attitude or deceptive nature; maybe just blissful ignorance. In most cases, it starts with a simple idea that everybody had, e.g. a CS50 class project that everybody else did, but they all saw the technical and legal and market and competitive challenges, and most importantly and predictably failed to answer the biggest question, “why me?”. Somehow the person with the worst answer to that question is always the one that fails to ask it. Despite this observation, none of this has changed the way I see things in my real life. I have read that the parasympathetic nervous system causes people to pay attention to details and become overwhelmed by risks. Chronic pain or fear or lack of sleep or overtraining or infection can do that. I recently had a lidocaine injection into a painful joint deformity, and the rest of that day I experienced astonishing positivity. So something tells me that it’s not really all that complicated, but simple things like happiness and good health and relationships are far more rare than we would expect, at least among those with curiosity for difficult subjects.
