I’ve spent a lot of time studying history and reading biographies of people who impacted our world or were at the top of their fields, and one thing I’ve noticed they all share is a certain level of resilience.

Everyone wants to know how to make it, and how to become successful, and something I’ve realized after working a lot on NP-hard problems is that trying to give a single solid answer to this question is like trying to solve NP-hard problems one-shot.

However, the good part is that if we slightly modify the question to “What does it take to become successful?”, then we’re able to find a trivial one-line answer to it, and that is: “Give it your best”.

It may sound like some BS answer but in reality, it is the key. To achieve any kind of success in life, you have to give it your best like your life depends on it.

Growth in the real world is very non-linear, and rarely operates in an additive way between effort and results, meaning if burning 1 kcal helps you lose 1kg of weight, burning 5 kcal doesn’t necessarily imply losing 5kg.

What makes Messi stand out in football? Picasso in art? Mozart in music? Andrej Karpathy in programming? Thomas Edison in invention? Marie Curie in science? Sam Altman in startups? Elon Musk in building companies? It’s the compounding effect of giving it their best and obsession with their craft.

Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.

J.K. Rowling, the British author of the immensely popular Harry Potter series got rejected by at least 12 publishing houses and spent years writing it.

Billie Eilish recorded 36 different trials to get one vocal right in her famous Bad Guy song.

OpenAI was started in 2015 with a mission of building Artificial General Intelligence but took 7 years for the world to take them seriously, with lots of setbacks from so-called AI experts back in the time.

Ilya Sutskever, the Chief Scientist at OpenAI and mastermind behind it, when asked about how he’s one of the rare scientists to continue making breakthroughs; which is extremely rare, says: “I try very hard, I give it everything I’ve got, and that works so far, and I think that’s all there is to it”.

I can go on all the way back in history and scale horizontally, but I hope you see the pattern. Determination does wonders for your career.

Exponential curves and success stories look wonderful while writing history backward, but in reality, people face immense challenges that require deep faith and resilience.

Whenever I meet someone successful that started from nothing, they all tend to tell me the same thing regardless of their profession: find something you love doing with people you enjoy working with.

But then there’s a pattern of continuous suffering, failing, taking a shot at the goal, and missing. It’s only after going through cycles like these, that the ball is in the yard, and their career trajectory hits an inflection point towards fame!