Never mind talent: Practice, practice, practice
So what about when you have someone like me who works hard and still fails? I vary my methods. change my environment to make it easier, pay for training, do what ever. I examine what I did wrong, I still get it wrong, no matter what.<p>Let me share with you an anecdote: In undergrad, I took an intro computer networking class. Everyone else could understand what was going on. There was no assigned reading material and lectures didn't follow from any text. I always was the lowest student in the class, no matter how hard I tried. Everyone else could understand it quickly. I worked hard on that class but it didn't matter. Not everyone who works hard will show positive results, I guess. I more or less flunked my way through school. Sometimes I'd work hard, sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter.<p>Or, if I'm facing someone who has worked hard and is also very intelligent? I don't have a chance.<p>The rhetoric of these articles and the rest of these posts here have a coded meaning behind them: there are no disadvantaged people or students -- only stupid or lazy ones. It's a corollary of Survivor Bias. If you work hard, everything will be peachy-keen OK and nothing will go wrong. If you work hard and fail,  you deserve only scorn.<p>For me, it was, never mind if you work so hard that ignored everything else, worked so hard to not get beaten by your parents, worked so hard to get mastery of material -- I must be still too lazy or stupid since I failed.<p>I don't know what it is that I don't have that everyone else does. I'm likely to not ever know.<p>This is a topic that I'm very familiar with so that's why I wrote a lot about it and sound perhaps a little crazy.