Dear Logan,
I just read this blog post written by the guy who created GMail. He somehow manages to tie programming, creating a business, politics, and religion all together, talking about how there’s always a short-cut that can be exploited by taking advantage of the difference between the intended rules and the actual reality of any system. I thought that he was going to continue to take the analogy into physics, but he didn’t go that far. Here’s my favorite part of the post:
“The entire process of building a business and having other people and computers do the work for you is a big hack. Nobody ever created a billion dollars through direct physical labor.”
Put another way, I think you could sum up this whole post as “the way to achieve success is to be creative”, but I like his spin on it. I’d probably revise that to “The way to achieve success is to be creative AND persistent.”