it's not as hard as it looks
i think we all occasionally fall into a trap: we attach some inhuman amount of effort to achieving something and assume it requires some insane level of locking in that we just don't have. that feeling is what most people call imposter syndrome. you look at something and automatically conclude that you can't do it because it's too hard for you or you think you're not smart enough. sorry or not sorry to burst your bubble, but it usually doesn't take nearly as much brilliance as you think.
a good illustration of this is math. think back to yourself in grade 4. if you'd seen the math grade 8 students were doing, it would have looked like magic. your little brain just wouldn't have been able to fathom how some people were even able to solve those questions. skip forward to grade 8, and you can reasonably understand the things that once looked impossible. what changed? you definitely didn't drink some magic potion that upped your iq. you just started learning the material and working through it, one intermediate step at a time. so, in grade 4, it looked like magic, but in grade 8, it's now just homework. the new "magic" that fascinates you is probably linear algebra and college-level math. don't worry, you'll conquer that soon as well!
that principle applies to almost everything. not always as neatly as school math, but most things that look super hard right now are things you could learn. the real obstacle to achieving those things usually isn't ability. it's consistency. playing the violin looks like magic, like some artistic moment of great perfection, but what you're not seeing is the years of practice behind it. kobe wasn't superhuman. he just showed up daily and practiced for years!
recently, people have noticed how many math olympiad medalists go on to build successful companies. it's easy, and perhaps even lazy, to conclude that they're just smarter than everyone else. many of them are talented, sure. however, if that alone were the requirement, a lot of people would easily replicate their success. what you don't see is the years of grinding through problems, getting stuck, and showing up on days they didn't feel like it. that's the part that transfers. building a company is mostly about navigating complexity and finding new angles when the obvious ones fail. and those are exactly the skill sets that olympiad training drills into you. it's also why quant firms like hrt love hiring them. nobody solves olympiad problems on a trading desk. what quant firms really want is the habit they've built of finding and creating new tricks when old or conventional ones don't work.
effort isn't magic, and it won't guarantee everything. however, it takes you much further than imposter syndrome lets you believe. the gap between you and the thing that looks like magic is mostly unseen time, not missing brilliance. so drop the imposter mentality and start putting in that time. you'll be surprised where it gets you.
unconventional thinker