> And maybe more relevant, but what are the factors that cause someone to have strong willpower and perseverance, and were those under their own control?

And that's the question, isn't it? Depending on where you draw your battery limits, you can take credit (and responsibility) for absolutely everything, or absolutely nothing.

To quote Tim Minchin, from his speech to UWA grads:

> Remember it’s all luck. You are lucky to be here. You are incalculably lucky to be born and incredibly lucky to be brought up by a nice family who encouraged you to go to uni. Or if you were born into a horrible family that’s unlucky and you have my sympathy but you are still lucky. Lucky that you happen to be made of the sort of DNA that went on to make the sort of brain which when placed in a horrible child environment would make decisions that meant you ended up eventually graduated uni. Well done you for dragging yourself up by your shoelaces. But you were lucky. You didn’t create the bit of you that dragged you up. They’re not even your shoelaces.

> I suppose I worked hard to achieve whatever dubious achievements I’ve achieved but I didn’t make the bit of me that works hard any more than I made the bit of me that ate too many burgers instead of attending lectures when I was here at UWA. Understanding that you can’t truly take credit for your successes nor truly blame others for their failures will humble you and make you more compassionate. Empathy is intuitive. It is also something you can work on intellectually.

But then, you didn't really make the part of you that make you humble.

Humility is not a line in your genome, it's a decision.

I have no way of knowing if that's true or false; mine was just a reply to:

> [..] but I didn’t make the bit of me that works hard [..] understanding [that] will humble you

with the half-serious logical extension: if the "bit of you that makes you prone to work hard" is inherited then perhaps also the "bit of you that makes you prone to be humble" can be inherited as well.

At some level most traits relevant to success are at least somewhat genetically influenced (intelligence, however measured, is estimated to be over 50% heritable). I'm sure willpower and perseverance are similar, and in that sense being hard working is kinda a roll of the dice, sure.

But if we go that far, then almost everything about you is just random chance. Congratulations, we've realized that we're not special, but products of evolution, and some of us are more fit than others in certain environments. What practical difference should that make?

Keep zooming out and we're all little hypertriangles in some N-dimensional cellular automaton, and there's no such thing as 'meaning', just patterns of higher or lower entropy. Don't think too much about it or it'll just make you depressed.

Nihilism isn't the only option. This is a decent starting guide if you're curious: https://meaningness.com/

Bit of a late reply, sorry, but I didn't mean that nihilism was the answer. I just meant that humans aren't well equipped, emotionally, to deal with the universe at scales too different from those at which we evolved.

You just can't afford to 'zoom out' too far. Focus on immediate small scale things, watch a beautiful sunset, hug your kids, ride a motorbike, eat your favourite meal. Focus on near-term goals like "bootstrap my company" or "reach my fitness goals". Worry about little problems that you can solve. Make someone smile. Smell the roses.

You can stay intellectually aware of the fact that we're transient pond scum on the surface of a space rock in an infinite, arbitrary universe. Just don't dwell on it.