Talk:General Discussion/@comment-25189003-20150318124951/@comment-139.228.125.101-20150319180234

^Schooled and educated are two different things. A lot of motivators miss the point when they use people like Gates and Jobs to illustrate things. See, both never finished school but are FAR MORE educated than 99% of college graduates. Gates was literally a genius who dropped out because he was already doing PhD-level work by the time he was a college sophomore. Jobs never finished school because he was poor then, but he used the audit method to basically take twice the courseload of his peers. Using these people as examples is the same as saying you need to have three times the learning power of the average person to succeed at anything.

A better example would be someone like Andrew Carnegie who started his career as a typist and went on to be the king of the world steel industry. Carnegie honestly wasn't very smart (he admitted this himself) but he knew how to work and persevere, to be kind towards others but also to be ruthless when the situation demanded it. Most importantly, the man was an introvert who used his introverted tendencies to his advantage. He did things like make himself difficult to access to his business partners at times when he needed them to realize how much they depended on him, or contemplate and make decisions in hiding to the point that most of his peers believed him to be an unpredictable genius. I mean, the guy basically exploited his hikkikomori tendencies to make himself look superhuman. You gotta give him credit for that.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when you're in a rut and you think there's no one willing to help, stop looking around and start looking inward. Know thyself and know thy enemies. And if you wanna go hikkikomori, go for it the Carnegie way. Think of ways to turn that tendency into an advantage. BTW, a more contemporary example is Vladimir Putin. When he secluded himself for a week recently, he effectively paralyzed Russia's leadership and made the oligarchs shit their pants. This, introverts of the world, is the kind of hikkikomori we should all strive to emulate!