Traits and signs of people with exceptional talent.
- Take risks and asymmetrical bets in life (eg: dropping out of college, changing career paths) and willing to experiment.
- Help out without expecting anything in return.
- Humorous!
- Able to be contrarian. Able to speak up against others. Can keep doing what they believe is the right thing in the absence of any positive feedback or only negative feedback from others. Then they must have some degree of self-confidence (ego), unwavering belief in themselves, and has the ability to say “I know I’m right, and you’re all wrong.” Are able to be mean to your face but nice behind your back.
- They can drop everything to work on a single thing if they decide that it’s important.
- Clear writing. Not necessarily speaking.
- People want to be what they are not. Amateurs want to seem like professionals, professionals want to seem like amateurs. Typically they attribute their success to luck.
- Operate fast, especially learning fast. Likely they’re inherently impatient. Signs of this: ship fast, learn fast, type fast, interested in optimizations, interrupts people. In software engineering roles, when compared to low performers, the high performers have: 46 times more frequent code deployments and 440 times faster lead time from commit to deploy! Another example is that the key measure of a player’s success in real-time strategy games when you to have balance resources, attention, knowledge, factors, and guesswork, is their APM (actions per minute). It doesn’t matter what the player does, but if they simply do more stuff, the higher APM, by sheer volume, leads to more successes in the long run.
- Always curious, always learning, always reading, always failing, willing to say “I don’t know”, seeking constant improvement.
- Deliver on schedule over perfection.
- Seemingly always ahead on important questions and insights in the world.
- Do what’s required to get where they want to get.
- Have a ton of interesting hobbies or side projects.
- Often had weird teenage hobbies. Teenagers usually go with the flow, so if they can go against the crowd then, then they can be unique as an adult. If they achieved breakthrough success in their hobbyist field, that’s huge signal.
- Intrinsically motivated and obsessively focused such that you think they’re a hermit, but they are always able to meet and talk to interesting people.
- Energy distortion. Talk to them and you feel like you are inspired to do anything. Typically they’re 2SDs more optimistic about something.
- High resiliency. They understand that suffering is a part of life and doesn’t discriminate. They focus on inputs they can control. They have belief in their influence on outcomes.
- For founders: Founder Traits.