Don't fret; everyone in our generation was raised to believe we were the 1 in 10,000. That simply can't be true 99.99% of the time.

We're a generation that needs therapy to realize that a stable, six-figure job as a mid-level engineer at 30 isn't failure. Our expectations (some might say entitlement) were set so unreasonably high that most of us have no chance of meeting them.

Well, that's simply unacceptable to me. A stable six-figure job is failure. If I'm fated to try and fail for the rest of my life to break into the 1 in 10,000, then so be it.

I think the idea is that the 1-in-10,000 in this context is that it's not something you can "break into"; you're either born gifted or you're not.

It's really hard for our generation to accept that some people really are born "better" -- which is exactly why the article mentions the education system now focuses on bringing up lower performers rather than identifying and accelerating gifted students.

I'm a strong believer in the idea that some people are born better, you don't have to convince me.

The extent of my abilities is still unknown to me. I know what I want to achieve and I will continue trying to achieve it until I succeed or I am dead. To accept anything less is equivalent to death.

May I ask how old you are? And what you're trying to achieve?

I'm 24.

My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century. I may not be considered the absolute greatest (rankings like that are very fickle anyway, and never universally agreed upon, even in the sciences). But I do want my works to be considered necessary for any future survey of the major works of this period.

> My goal is to be one of the most influential video game designers of this century.

Shouldn't your goal be to make great games? Otherwise, aren't you striving for a goal defined by other people? For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.

If you are enjoying the journey you are on, then go for it (and I hope you are spending as much time on your social network as you are on games). Otherwise, I'd urge you to consider the opportunity costs of a narrow, intense focus.

>Shouldn't your goal to be to make great games?

That was an implied sub-goal. The verification criteria I gave was merely to illustrate what the concrete results of my endeavors might look like. If I said flatly "I want to make great games," then someone might reasonably respond "how do you know you're succeeding?"

>For goals like yours, politics and personality can matter as much as the work itself.

This is quite true. But Paul Graham has a great quote which I think might be applicable here: "Everyone in the sciences secretly believes that mathematicians are smarter than they are... And so there is a great temptation to work on problems you can treat formally, rather than problems that are, say, important."

> That was an implied sub-goal.

Being influential and making something great aren't necessarily linked. In music, for example, lots of musicians I adore list Captain Beefheart as an influence. Captain Beefheart never really achieved much commercial success. I don't like his stuff at all.

Anyway, I sincerely hope that your work towards making something great is enjoyable or at least doesn't consume all of your time. Life is short and there's more things worth experiencing than we have time for.

Sorry to break it to you, but the most influential video game designers were born in the 70s.

They've made Doom, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 1-2, Everquest, Master of Orion and all the other classics in the 90s and very early 2000s.

Most games released today are either donationware (WoT) or completely derivative works (think long running series like CoD or sports games), or survival-game clones like No Man's Sky (and about 500 others)

Your best bet would probably be to join Valve and get them to release Episode 3 if you ever want to get any renown and not just endlessly try to push your games on Greenlight.

Sorry if this sounded harsh.

You have a very limited conception of what video games are capable of.

This is like going up to an aspiring writer in ancient Greece and saying "The Odyssey has already been written, there is nothing more to be done." Not realizing that 2,000 years later, authors like Joyce and Nabokov would still be breaking new ground.

Assuming the human race endures long enough, video games are at the very beginning of what is going to be a very long and interesting history.

I actually hope you prove me wrong in the most spectacular way possible, because the current games are very stale and derivative.

Star Citizen is the only thing on the horizon that shows promise, at least to my personal tastes.

Best of luck in your endeavors.

Star Citizen isn't even revolutionary though; it's more or less a modern re-imagining of EVE Online. It'll likely devolve into spreadsheet hell just like EVE -- reality is boring, and most of the real world is tracked in spreadsheets.

I do think there is some possibility for innovation in gaming with AR/VR, but I also agree we've probably reached the point of diminishing returns with what we can do with current control schemes (monitor + mouse/keyboard/gamepad).

It's funny you should mention EVE Online, because it's the only MMORPG I've ever played seriously and the only game I've played for longer than a year that kept my interest. It was also pretty revolutionary for 2003 when it came out.

The highest level of gameplay involved very little spreadsheet hell and a lot more skill, leadership and coordination that one might think originally if they did not have a strong corporation to align with. It's true that there a LOT of numbers behind the gameplay that you had to consider, but spreadsheet hell was a result of poor UI/UX choices and not necessarily of game design.

If Star Citizen can replicate that, but with better graphics, and personal ship control (instead of EVE's point and click) - they will already be a success in my book.

Please forgive my blunt opinion, but I think you're incorrectly equating your potential with your legacy. Legacy is greatly influenced by achieving your potential, but ultimately outside of your control. It depends on timing, politics, other people, etc. You cannot control whether you will be recognized or not. You can only wake up each day and do your best. It sounds corny but imo its the only sane way to go about achieving your potential.

Are you more interested in making games themselves or being known as an influential designer in the future?

Well... you talk about video games as if they are a high art. You might be in for more than one wake up call in the near future.

One of my further goals is to disabuse people of notions such as this.

As it happens, though, I'm already too late to be the initiator of this sort of cultural shift. Universities like NYU and CMU already offer MFAs in game design. There are conferences and journals dedicated to game studies. So the wheels are already in motion.

Reminds of this experiment in a subway station where they put a world class violinist with a stradivarius to play some of the most highly regarded violin music. The only person that stopped for this high art performance was one that recognized the musician.

The point being that high art can be right in front of us and we may miss it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-bef...

Well... they're certainly much higher that modern abstract art bullshit people buy for thousands

Got a link to your games?

I hope to release my first project in 4-5 months.

What's it about?

I'm not sure if I want to go into details, since I haven't decided if I want to link any of my internet accounts to my professional identity yet... perhaps when it's released I will come back and make an announcement. :)

I hope you've read all of actionbutton.net.

Aut Vincere Aut Mori, Ad Victoriam Aeternam - Conquer or Die, to Eternal Victory

This is the kind of guy I want on my team.

>A stable six-figure job is failure.

If you look at the study, only a quarter of the gifted students made it to the 95% income percentile.

Being a Genius doesn't make you rich or happy or give you a satisfaction. It makes it more likely you'll have a PhD & produce academic papers.

To get to 95% income percentile, you need to earn at least $190k a year. I'd be very interested in seeing how many gifted students don't reach, say, 75% percentile, which is around $90k a year, and why.

Smart people dont need to grind their life away to brag to their peers about their middle class income.

Hopefully for all of us, theyre doing something more innovative for society, no matter how long it takes.

A lot of them are earning low wages because they have PhD and are professors

Stop focusing on being special and actually dedicate yourself to something real.

I have an extremely specific set of projects I want to implement.

Not only it's not a failure, it's the optimal happiness zone. It's enough that all the basic needs are met and there is a decent amount of freedom and low stress, and low enough to be able to keep a modest mentality.

In my college class there were two kids I would call absolute geniuses, possibly the smartest folk I have ever met. One wrote his senior thesis his second year there (on compilers and type theory) and another was a young philosophy transfer student from Deep Springs who regularly owned and outwitted professors in class to such a degree that rumors abounded he would be offered a faculty position after graduating. And he was. But he didn't take the position. Why? Because he killed himself a few days later, jumped in front of a train. The kid who wrote his senior thesis sophomore year got a job working for Google when he was nineteen (this was back when Google was still cool and considered the elite of the elite) and killed himself before his 21st birthday.

My point is that academic performance and intellect doesn't mean shit outside the academy and is a terrible indicator to use for success or accomplishment. It's never too late.

I won't ever know how people like that process the world but my guess is that they are attuned to the sheer horror of it in a way that most people can't conceive of, and aren't able to distract themselves from this with other pursuits. Following this taking their own lives becomes the only solution they can envision.

I'm a 22 year old student and developer. I took a test that said I was gifted as a kid. Since I was very young, I've sensed 'sheer horror' constantly. It's when I see my friends and family, and they describe their aspirations that they won't reach for lack of insight; its the people that get stuck in a local minimum of cognotive dissonance who decide not to seek the global minimum. The coming death of the world is the strongest and most painful, because to help avoid that is to decimate my interpersonal relationships in pursuit of a craft that I could use to grow a business that might have some shred of succeeding and granting me the power of influence. I can't meet people without perceiving their flaws that they won't acknowledge. Every day I am appalled by my mistakes and failures of the week, yet my standards are so high that I cannot even express my grief without people rolling their eyes at my lofty goals.

I should be writing my integration tests.

Is there a way to contact you?

still want to? just write something in this simple app i'm serving and I'll check it out.

deppth.me/tasks

afterwards, go back and check to see if I left a reply.

On the face of it, this is nonsensical, and highly offensive to people who are actually suffering. My first intuition is that no safe, warm, and dry college student could be "attuned to the sheer horror of the world" on the basis of their intelligence alone.

On the other hand, you clearly have to be in a lot of pain if you're driven to kill yourself, and we shouldn't underestimate the degree of torture that one can inflict on oneself with one's own mind.

Yes, I think you are right. These were two very well-off people who basically had a meal ticket to success and accomplishment but chose a different path. I don't think it's because they were 'attuned' to suffering moreso than anyone (it doesn't take a genius to realize the world is a horrible, cruel place) but rather their immense mental faculties took up so much of their mind's resources that their well-being and emotional intellect suffered. At least, that's what it seemed to me but we will never know. Neither left a note.

There are lots of "late bloomers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_bloomer

My academic performance was average, but I did place first in a math Olympiad in my school. That said, I was competing with kids that didn't know algebra and I got basically every question right.

Intelligence, even super-intelligence, is rarely a key determinant of success, despite what you will read here.

That's why you need to invest in index funds (ideally the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100), high-IQ companies - specifically Google Amazon and Facebook- or use the inverse ETF decay strategy that makes 20-40 percent a year.

Buying in-the-money call options using 3-1 leverage on Google, Amazon, and Facebook has returned 200% since 2013 vs. 30% for S&P 500.

The motivation behind this strategy is that average-IQ people can make good money piggybacking off the creative contributions of America's smartest .1%. Facebook, Amazon, and Google stock will keep rising, as part of this trend, allowing average people to profit by joining the ride.

But existential problems are harder to solve than money ones, and even the smartest are faced with them (hence philosophy as a subject).

I was with you until the individual stock purchase and leverage bit. For most people this is NOT a wise strategy as they have neither the investing experience nor savings to gamble like that.

The backtest of the strategy I developed risks $10k to make $100k since 2013. It attains maximum drawdown if all three stocks (AMZN FB GOOG ) fall 30% because 3-1 leverage is used. But since it's an option strategy, you don't risk more than the $10k invested. Yeah there is risk, but GOOG AMZN and FB have a combined market cap of about 1 trillion. It could be modified to be more diverse but returns are less. The sharpe ratio fr the strategy (which is a way of quantifying risk vs. returns) is 2 vs .80 for the S&P 500 in that period.

This strategy could be a good way for someone with a small amount of money to make quick returns and then later move to a more conservative strategy.