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So says Paul Graham, a founder of the famed venture capitalist firm Y Combinator. Though most people assume that intelligence is the biggest factor in startup success, determination—tempered by discipline and guided by ambition—is actually the best way to tell whether an early-stage startup will win the race.

Graham describes this special mix of personal qualities by comparing success to a melon seed positioned between two fingers:

We can imagine will and discipline as two fingers squeezing a slippery melon seed. The harder they squeeze, the further the seed flies, but they must both squeeze equally or the seed spins off sideways.

If this is true it has interesting implications, because discipline can be cultivated, and in fact does tend to vary quite a lot in the course of an individual’s life. If determination is effectively the product of will and discipline, then you can become more determined by being more disciplined.

Another consequence of the melon seed model is that the more willful you are, the more dangerous it is to be undisciplined. There seem to be plenty of examples to confirm that. In some very energetic people’s lives you see something like wing flutter, where they alternate between doing great work and doing absolutely nothing. Externally this would look a lot like bipolar disorder.

The melon seed model is inaccurate in at least one respect, however: it’s static. In fact the dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. Which means, interestingly, that determination tends to erode itself. If you’re sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean.

Read the full essay at PaulGraham.com.

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