"The ultimate point of Masters of Doom is that today you no longer need to be as brilliant as John Carmack to achieve success, and John Carmack himself will be the first to tell you that. Where John was sitting in a cubicle by himself in Mesquite, Texas for 80 hours a week painstakingly inventing all this stuff from first principles, on hardware that was barely capable, you have a supercomputer in your pocket, another supercomputer on your desk, and two dozen open source frameworks and libraries that can do 90% of the work for you. You have GitHub, Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and the whole of the Internet."<p>Which is bad news if your strength is that you are a good programmer, because in this kind of environment games become a commodity, so you have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other game developers who also don't have to be as briliant as Carmack. See the app market; it has a winner take all characteristic, so even if you don't have to be as brilliant as Carmack in programming, you have to be very strong in something or lucky to achieve success.<p>As I remember Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky took venture capital to take off stack overflow. (And also they had a huge following even before starting that venture.)<p>I kind of don't really buy these kind of 'motivational' posts. Achieving success is always possible but always hard.