Come I can never be that good at anything

One way to interpret what Bill is trying to say, is that we don't have enough ambitious people in the world like Elon Musk.

If Bill knew "a hundred Elon Musks," he might have not made that statement.

Another way to interpret what Bill is trying to say - and I think this is the more interesting interpretation - is that he is inviting you to become one of the next hundred Elon Musks.

What you observe in Musk and Gates is called the halo effect. Both men have had failures, we just tend to be blind to them. Gates was never able to enter the phone market for example and Musk almost failed with Tesla on several occasions and has basically failed with consumer solar.

Remember, the point of trying is partially failing and learning from those failures. That is what ultimately will make you a success. If you don't risk failure and only attempt things you know you will succeed in then you will never be more than mediocre.

This is a feeling I know very well. This sinking feeling you get when nothing clicks into place and you struggle just to exist. Your peers' efforts often seem like glamorous rocketships taking off to great fanfare as they pass you by with ease. The self-inflicted pep talk about overcoming adversity and just sticking with it until you make it, when it's already plain to see for your friends and acquaintances that you're going nowhere. The truth is, this is normal. It may be your fault, it may be bad luck, you'll likely never know. The answer "try again, harder, try something different" seems trite and besides the point, but it's still the correct answer in my opinion. Life is an exploratory process for most people.

I think the question "why did I never..?" is the result of expectations that do not match normal human lives. Especially when comparing yourself to the likes of Elon Musk and Bill Gates, you need to realize that these are literally one-in-a-billion lives. While they may be especially gifted individuals, please do not discount the immensity of their luck and fortune.

Literally every single thing in their existence conspired to get them where they are today. When you read accounts or biographies of people like these, I invite you to pay special attention to casual references about what other celebrities they were connected to from an early age. All those weird "oh yeah, Neil Young usually dropped by our house every weekend for a jam session" moments.

However, I allege this is completely unconnected to being good at something. Being good at something is a product of effort and ability. Especially in technical and knowledge areas, there are very few gate keepers preventing you from getting good. There will probably be gatekeepers preventing you from practicing that skill, but then again, getting good is only ever the beginning of a journey.

> When I try to copy successful people...

That is your first mistake! Don't copy. You are not them. You are "you". You are different from them. Adapt, don't copy. You should observe successful people and adapt some of their thinking to your situation. Just copying verbatim is not going to help.

> For people who are successful all the time, it is like everything always just clicks.

Because you don't see their failures. They rarely have time to talk about their failures. The motto most successful people follow is "Learn from your and other's mistakes quitely, but brag about your successes".

> People who are successful almost never fail it seems, and when they do, it is temporary.

Because "successful people" don't cry in public. They cry silently alone when no one is watching; gather themselves and start over again. You have not seen how painful it is to be successful and to maintain that success. I have seen people like these in my life.

> Elon Musk has never failed. Bill gates never failed.

Who said that?!? Have you heard of X.com? Microsoft was not an instant success. Microsoft was a software consultancy company for almost a decade before it became "Microsoft". Watch Steve Ballmer's Oxford Union speech and listen carefully when he reveals at what stage he joined Microsoft. That is never mentioned in the story you hear about Microsoft.

> They never stumble.

I don't know where you get this information from. Can you link to the source? The PR hype machine of these big companies, their job is to make the founders look good, always successful people and not failures. So don't go by the stories you read in the media about these super hero founders. It never works that way.

> Do you think it comes down to luck, genes, connections, hard work, etc. I know it is not hard work. Everyone works hard.

You missed a very important item from that list: smart work! Just hard work is not enough. It is hard+smart work, plus getting out and forming connections(they don't happen automagically, you need to cultivate it over many years!) and then comes the luck part. Genes has nothing to do with anything related to success.

> Some say you need 10,000 hours but not all hours are crated equal. It is evident some are getting way more mileage for their hours than others.

Those specific figures that come out of US writers/consultants/advisers/coaches is for click-baity reasons. Don't believe them. It all depends on context and circumstances when it comes to learning. 10,000 hours looks like is just plucked out of thin air to sell more copies of some self-help book.

Successful people aren't successful because everything they do works out 100% of the time. Some of it comes down to skill, yes, but a lot of it comes down to luck and handling adversity. You mention hard work; most of the hard work comes from dealing with setbacks.

I should also point out that the 3 people you mentioned come from a TREMENDOUS amount of privilege, so they were free to take risks knowing they had a safety net to fall back on. Most people don't have those safety nets and therefore not able to take such large risks.

I can tell from this post that you're probably at a creative nadir and need some encouragement. All I can say is keep trying, but stop trying to put yourself on the same pedestal as Elon, Gates, or Brady. One of the worst things you can do is measure yourself against another's success.

My bit of advice: set incremental, achievable goals. Define what success means to you, then break that down into smaller goals that you can accomplish along the way. The end goal might be to be a successful billionaire entrepreneur. But the first goal might be to learn a new skill. You want to make a website or an app? Learn React or Vue.js. Learn about web hosting. Make some starter projects and throw them out on Github. Then work from there, find out the next step, and build upon what you learned.

I hope this helps, and good luck!

In Bill Gates case there's also every failure of Microsoft, not all microsoft products still exist, and for good reason.

Just because we know them by their successes, does not mean they don't have failures.

That point out of the way, how do you define success? Money, fame, pride?

Use it to drive you and no discourage you.

Now if you are discussing problems with relationships, that’s a whole other website.

Good luck to you!

It become harder to make money as time goes on

Almost all of them have risked everything at some point, barely scraped by, had a chance encounter with a stranger or friend of a friend. What you're seeing in these people isn't success. It is a lot of random circumstances culminating in the appearance of success. That is not to say Phil Knight and Elon and Bill didn't work hard or didn't have vision, but to look at them now and just see "success" and not "success + luck + failures + decades of trying + genes + a million other variables" is where you're falling short.

If you can change your perception you can realize that you could attempt what they attempted, and you'll likely fail the same way they did, and maybe you'll never succeed. But the important part is that success is entirely up to you, because you're the one defining it for yourself. If that is "I want to be a tech entrepreneur making a billion dollars", then you better start studying every single tech entrepreneur in existence, and start studying business and technology and startups and consuming every shred of information you can find about it.

Then you start trying to get there, one step at a time. And you have to be okay with the possibility that you'll maybe never get there. But spending your life trying to achieve something you want to achieve is as good a life as any.

There's a huge component of luck and everything. For every Bill and Elon, there's 10,000 guys as talented as them that didn't have their luck, and you don't hear about them. Elon and Bill are just guys who have won a dozen coinflips in a row - if millions of people are trying, it WILL happen to someone eventually.

Also, Bill Gates had a lot of help from his mom when he needed it most (getting an in with IBM). He had the right leverage.

I've seen people in my life that had access to the right leverage (meaning: the leverage they could use suited their personalities). In all cases they were successful. I believe strongly that when you have leverage that other people do not have access to, and knowledge on how to safely use that leverage then you'll be financially successful.

For example, I feel that a disproportiante amount of children with rich parents benefit from housing prices rising [1]. Even if rich children first start completely in debt, simply by owning a house that on average returns 10% (since it will be in a nice area) that they can later rent out is already a ticket to retirement before one starts working.

Before asking how people can become successful, simply ask yourself if they had a strong form of leverage that they were able to use effectively? If so, then you might want to reconsider that you could have done it as well.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:q8zP-N... -- weak source I know, but I bet that it's true.