Hard Work is the Secret to Success
They've proven again that hard work, not talent is the secret to success. Secrets of greatness: Practice and hard work bring success – October 30, 2006
Research now shows that the lack of natural talent is irrelevant to great success. The secret? Painful and demanding practice and hard work
Even when you are talking about people like Tiger Woods and Warren Buffett. I think this is really hard for people to accept. Maybe it's hard to accept because then we'd have to accept that we aren't billionaires or star football players because we didn't work hard enough at it.
I'd bet that success is greatly tied to interest. It's hard to work really hard at something you aren't interested in. But if you like writing code, you enjoy solving that puzzle, then you do it a lot and you get good at it. Once you are good at it, people give you kudos, and maybe even pay you, and that motivation makes you feel good, and so you do it some more, and you get better at it. Sooner or later you're really good at it because you've been "practicing" hard for a long time.
(So that's why, if you aren't good at writing blog posts or comments, you should keep at it!)
The article also points out to be good you not only have to practice, but you have to get lots of feedback and you have to incorporate that feedback into your practice.
So that's why the open source community writes such good code and produces good hackers. They write lots of code (i.e. practice a lot) and get lots of feedback.
