Are you saying the bar is lower than we think for stuff like like… winning karma on lesswrong? (I agree for publishing content in public most people, including myself, probably should just go for it more)
Or are you also saying the bar is lower than we think for really hard things as well like making a scientific breakthrough or getting elected to your county’s parliament or making 100 million dollars?
I think it’s worth clarifying—what were these acomplishments? Were they easy things or hard things? If they are genuinely hard things then this is a very interesting observation.
I totally buy that someone might have a weird idea for a party game that they were scared to try—but then they tried anyway and it killed. I totally buy that the only thing standing in the way of us writing a decent blog post or cooking a delicious meal could be not realising how low the bar is.
But I don’t think this insight generalizes well to difficult endevours. For something really hard which requires sustained commitment and sacrifice in order to pull off—the initial push to “just go for it” is only a tiny component of the total investment required.
Even for things that are only a little bit difficult, but require sustained effort—like losing weight without drugs—almost everyone overweight attempts this and most don’t succeed. The bar was higher than they thought. When you say “I have a ~25% chance of making a great scientific discovery if I made it my full time job” that’s meaningless conditional if you’re not actually capable of willing yourself to devote your life to it. It’s akin to the observation “I’d have a 99+% chance of achieving an amazing physique if I exercised and dieted better”
For a really ambitious goal like building a billion dollar buisness or winning a Grammy Award—my impression is the bar is higher than people think and I don’t think people should try it more!
My crappy title for the version of this post I’d agree with would be “the bar height as a function of your goal has a lot more variance than you think”. Easy things are easier than we think, hard things are harder