Deserving
2026/9/7 GMT-4
Hello, I'm Stickman Charles.
A while ago, I saw a video from a pretty famous investor. He said, "If you don't deserve something, you will never be able to get it. If you don't believe me, you will make a lot of mistakes."
This video got over 10,000 views. There were many comments below it, mostly cheering him on and agreeing with him.
I won't say who he is, because this idea doesn't come from a single person, but from a whole group of people.
In Carol Dweck's Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, there is a question: do you believe you can grow your skills through time and practice, or do you think they are unchangeable?
The fact is, your improvement mostly depends on your own mindset. If you believe it's changeable, you take more chances to learn, and you actually grow faster.
Back to the investor's opinion. It works the same way. If you believe you can't get something you don't "deserve", you probably won't try at all, or you'll try with less confidence. That makes the opinion look true, but only because you proved it yourself. We call it a self-fulfilling prophecy: when you believe something will happen, that belief changes your actions in a way that makes it actually happen.
On the other hand, if you believe your growth can take you to your dream, then even if you don't reach it, you still gain experience and live the way you want.
A few days ago, I took part in the MLH Midnight hackathon. It was my first blockchain hackathon, and the first hackathon of my life. My project was EchoCert Midnight Demo, focusing on private proof of university applications and diplomas.
I prepared for a week before the hackathon started: the idea, the business value, the flow of my introduction video, and the steps I planned to take during the event.
After a few days of waiting, I found out I didn't win a prize in my track. That might look like I didn't deserve it, but if you check my GitHub account, you can see two issues I reported during the hackathon. They're about test token generation and preprod transaction processing. You can tell they affected all the other participants too: the Chrome extension crashes because of Chrome's memory management system (lace #2257), and preprod transaction processing breaks down (midnight-wallet #700).
In this hackathon, I had to learn how to decide what my final project should look like, how much time to spend on unexpected problems, and most importantly, how to record and report an issue properly.
You can't say those skills aren't important. I'll use them again and keep improving them. But first, you need to accept that long-term growth matters more than an instant result.
In fact, it's hard to say whether something belongs to you or not. You can't know before you try. When I first created EchoForge, I never thought I could go this far as a student. The same goes for Stickman Charles.
Your start might be just a simple idea, or just a mistake you made, but it should never be an excuse to avoid challenging yourself and facing the problem.
You only know if you try.
Keep thinking, and take care.