It doesn't seem surprising to me. Doing anything really hard is as much about mastering oneself as about domain knowledge. You'd hear similar things from a lot of top athletes, for example.
And while "entrepreneurship" in general is not necessarily hard, the path Slava has chosen is. It's not easy to start a new database company.
I think it makes sense when viewed another way. Only a select few, about 3% of this country are wealthy, even though one can create their own wealth here. I think the reason is two-fold. First, it's remarkably rare for a person to actually act on their ambitions. Next, when you consider that the default for startups is failure (as PG wrote), and that even smart people fail, it seems to indicate there is something more the people with self-made success have. If all were not born with these valuable qualities, some likely gained them through conscious self-improvement.
The 'something more' might just be luck. Imagining that there's some Nietzschean superhero quality you can cultivate in order to succeed where many people just like you have failed is a kind of magical thinking.
When you drive to work and hit all green lights, do you search deep within yourself for the elusive quality that set you apart from the red-light-stopping masses?
My response to that, and I got this from some movie I can't remember, is that I prefer to think I create my own luck. Let's hypothesize that opportune situations arise for all people at various times. All things being equal, only a select few people, like Bill Gates, or Mark Cuban, become significantly wealthy. I feel this may appear to many to be luck on the surface, but that there was actually a lot of unseen maneuvering and positioning (i.e. hard work) going on behind the scenes possibly for years which allows such individuals to capitalize on their lucky opportunity when it presents itself.
i.e. that the wealthy are only relatively so, and as such are defined as the rightward long tail of the income distribution, and thus are few (by definition).
Also, a tautology is a statement that is necessarily true. However, 3% doesn't necessarily mean a diminished value. For example, if your local bank had a promotion which guaranteed a 3% daily interest savings return that would be considered quite a lot.
Yes, I agree that fearlessness and inspiration sound like ridiculously simple qualities to have. My point was that people are made up of various strengths and weaknesses, and it's rare for anyone to have the requisite full toolbox for self-made success. In that case, self-improvement type advice doesn't seem so weird.
