It Always Becomes a Battle of Willpower By The End

You will have to work harder than others.

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If you want to upskill to an exceptionally high level, enough to build a career around it and achieve a high level of success in your field, then you’re going to have to compete against people who are more advantaged than you.

There are many different types of upskilling advantages. Starting at an earlier age is an advantage, so is having access to superior training resources, so is having transferable skills from other skill trees that you’ve climbed. Biological factors (cognitive, physical, dispositional, etc.) often come into play, and some of these factors cannot be changed through extra training, or have soft limits to the range of improvement that can be expected.

Exceptionally advantaged upskillers tend to have some combination of all of these advantages. They are rare enough that you may not encounter them initially, but the higher you climb up the skill tree, the more frequently you’ll run into them – and even if you manage to climb high enough that you’re no longer in direct competition with other people, then it means you’re in direct competition with an even more challenging opponent, the universe itself.

So, while it’s a good idea to upskill in directions where you have advantages, it’s important to accept that you will eventually climb high enough that those advantages become table stakes. Lean into your relative advantages, but don’t center your identity on them, because no matter how big of a leg up you have at the beginning of your upskilling journey, it always becomes a battle of willpower by the end.

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