Hmm, I'd guess it's harder than that. Being energetic and determined may be a necessary condition to change the world but it is not a sufficient condition. There are plenty of energetic and determined people who won't change the world.

Though, as far as one can predict, I bet determination is the best indicator we can hope for.

I didn't mean to imply that we can predict perfectly. No one could, since luck is a factor. But we can narrow the field.

You still can't predict just who, out of a reasonably large pool of energetic and determined people, will be the ones with the really big payoffs (for whatever definition of payoff, be it monetary, a big discovery or whatever).

You can probably say with some degree of certainty, which people won't do anything big. That might still leave a pretty large group of people, though.

Who else thinks it would be a lot of fun to see a Graham-Taleb debate on startups? In the end, I think he'd probably like what YC does, because you're giving some people the freedom to "tinker" full time, along with the support to take advantage of the tinkering if it produces something cool. Given a non-infinite supply of money and attention time, of course you're going to have to pick and choose who gets those things. I wonder if he would suggest any changes to the format?

One paradox is that a failure at the right point in time may give one the motivation they need to succeed.

For example, a person applies to YC. They get rejected and use that as incredible motivation to succeed in spite of that. If they had been selected, would they still have had that motivation?

Taleb actually says something similar in his answer to the 2007 Edge question:

"The only bad news is that we can't really tell where the good news are going to be about, except that we can locate it in specific locations, those with a high number of trials. More tinkering equals more Black Swans. Go look for the tinkerers."

http://edge.org/q2007/q07_5.html#taleb

The Forbes article is basically just the edge answer minus a few paragraphs, although sadly the paragraphs that got cut were the ones that would probably be most interesting to YC types.

Trevor Blackwell calls it tweakability. http://tlb.org/busywork.html

Moreover, the extent to which you predict who the world-changers will be does not have to be great.

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...

One reason that applicants should not take rejection personally is that YC would be wasting time trying to evaluate them with 100% accuracy.

For founders, a more inspiring title might be "You can't predict how you'll change the world."

> All the people who've changed the world have been energetic and determined.

I'm not so sure about this. I'd rather like to think: All the people who have taken credit for stuff that has changed the word have been energetic and determined.