> Have you ever met a 12 year old know-it-all? Same thing.

Not at all. Words versus deeds. There are tons of inexperienced people who talk like they know everything; but of those, very few of them actually set out to do the things that "require experience."

Say that there's a person who thinks they have an awesome idea for a game, but knows nothing about game development. It's the difference between them talking about this amazing game they want to make "one day", or maybe them posting on Upwork saying "I have an awesome idea for a game, I just need someone to build it"; and them sitting down and trying to actually build their idea themselves right now.

It's also a question of how they confront obstacles. Most people without this trait of inexhaustible self-confidence, when they realize they don't have the skills to do something, will stop trying to do it, or will shelve the project and set out to first learn those skills. (And maybe never get back to their original dream/passion, instead just using the acquired skills in more mundane ways. All of you here who got into programming because you wanted to be a game developer know what I mean.)

A person with this mindset, meanwhile, will create the best version of the thing they can right now with their limited skillset, and then keep iterating on it, improving their skills in the process of creating the thing.

For an example, there are quite a number of webcomic artists working today, who, when they started, didn't know a thing about drawing (or much of anything, being teenagers), and it shows in their first comics. But they didn't care that they didn't know how to do it well; as long as they could do it at all, they just did it, and kept doing it, drawing and publishing a strip every day. And over the years, doing so has taught them how to draw—such that now, they're great at what they do.

I sometimes like to call that actionable arrogance rather than inexhaustible self-confidence. I knew a lot of people who had the initiative you're referring to, but most of them ended up failing at miserably at their ventures (which makes sense if you look at the number of startups that turn into successful businesses). There's also the aspect of luck which I hear commonly defined as "where preparation meets opportunity."

I think this is really a huge part of it. Right place, right time.

There are plenty of brilliant people with ideas actually executed very well that just go nowhere for whatever reason or other.

Also right team, right people, I mean, right circumstances in general. In those kinds of right circumstances, the dumb move would be not to capitalize on it.

>Linus didn't win the debate vs Tanenbaum. He simply happened to be the right guy at the right place at the right time.

He just kept building, even though he was aware that there was a "competitor" in the space. I mean, look at his very first Usenet post announcing Linux ("just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu") - sometimes "just keep building" is all it takes, and the established leaders have far less of an advantage than we think they do.

By building something that runs the world, Linux won the debate. Tanenbaum is revealed as an ivory-tower guy with strong opinions, but who only built a toy. By building Linux into what it is, Torvolds proved that a monolithic kernel works just fine.

Plot twist : Tanenbaum's microkernel design that he argues for vs Linus actually runs on every Intel cpu (as minix 3), and thus is technically the most used operating system in the world.

Um, what are you talking about here? In what sense does Minix 3 run on every Intel CPU?

And, plot twist: ARM CPUs may outnumber Intel CPUs...

Yep, I forgot about ARM. I was referring to https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ ; Minix is certainly not just a toy, it is very widely used.