I suspect that Hacker News has a bit of selection bias, in that most of the people here are driven, success-oriented individuals who'd like to believe that hard work makes a difference. We've already read all the articles about how success comes from diligence and practice, and that feats that seem superhuman are just the result of focused effort over time.

In my personal experience, the majority of people do not think like this. When I was going through grade school, my parents/teachers/etc. often did use words like "awe-inspiring achievements", even for fairly mundane things like getting perfect scores on standardized tests. I got into Amherst through a process very much like the article describes (I had terrible grades but had worked at an all-teenage dot-com startup and aced my standardized tests). In the "brag session" where the director of admissions lists all the awe-inspiring resumes of the incoming freshman class, she said "And one of the students passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class", and a murmur of appreciation passed along the crowd. Really, it's not that hard, you read a book and then you pay $75 for a test - but most of them don't know that.

I think it's great that there's more understanding going around of what achievement actually stems from. But that understanding certainly isn't universal, and in the meantime, you can hack people's perceptions of you by playing to the blind spots in their own knowledge. "Everything is impossible until I know how to do it, and then it's trivial."

> passed 8 AP tests without taking a single AP class

Passing AP tests is impressive? Whoa.

That was my thought too, but a surprisingly large number of people were impressed. Which was the article's point. There's no accounting for taste, I guess. (Well, actually there is an accounting for taste, and that's what the article was about. People can be irrational and yet have perfectly rational explanations for their irrationality.)