Same college. Same skills. Different outcomes. Here’s why. https://x.com/i/article/2110668370379214848
The Unfair Advantage: Curiosity, Agency & Drive
Take two people from the same college, with the same degree, the same DSA grind, the same development experience and the same internship.
One of them keeps winning. Offers, promotions, the interesting projects, the "hey, can you take this on?" messages from founders.
The other one keeps waiting.
On paper there's no difference between them. Same skills, same résumé, same opportunities. So what's going on?
I watched this happen during my last internship, and I've seen it again and again at the companies where my friends work. And for the first year of college, I was the one waiting. The gap almost never comes from talent. It comes from three behaviours that nobody grades you on and every startup quietly hires for:
Curiosity. Agency. Drive.
Most people think these are personality traits: you either have them or you don't. They aren't traits. They're habits, and habits can be built.
Here's how I built mine.
The loop
I don't treat these as three separate things. They make a loop:
- Curiosity is the spark. Why does this work this way, and not the other way?
- Agency is the permission. I'll figure it out myself. I don't need anyone to assign it to me.
- Drive is the fuel. I'll keep going even when nobody is watching.
Curiosity finds the question. Agency makes you act on it. Drive gets you through the boring middle part where most people quit. Then you ship something, you learn something, and that makes you curious about the next thing.
If you take away any one of them, the loop breaks:
- Curiosity without agency is endless YouTube tutorials and nothing built.
- Agency without curiosity is moving fast in the wrong direction.
- Drive without the other two is my first year of college: a lot of energy and nothing to show for it.
1. Curiosity: "Why is it like this?"
Most people stop at how. They learn how to use the tool, run the command or follow the process, and then they move on.
Curious people ask why.
Why is this system built this way? Why not the other way? What would break if we changed it? Who decided this, and what did they know that I don't?
That one extra question is the difference between someone who can follow instructions and someone who can be trusted with a problem nobody has solved yet. Startups need the second kind, because most of their problems haven't been solved yet.
What this looks like for me: whenever I hit something I don't understand, I open a doc. I don't keep it in my head, I don't bookmark it for later, I write it down. In the doc I put:
1. What I know so far
1. What I don't know (written out as actual questions)
1. How it works, once I've figured it out
1. Why it works that way, which is the part most people skip
The doc forces me to be honest about the gaps. You can't fake your way through a blank "why" section. By the time it's filled in, I don't just know the thing, I understand it, and that's what lets me go further than people who only memorised it.
Try this: next time something at work or college confuses you, open a blank doc and write down three "why" questions about it before you search for anything. You'll be surprised how much better your searches get.
2. Agency: Stop waiting for permission
This is the one that changed my career the most.
Most people are trained, by school, by college and by their first jobs, to wait. Wait for the assignment. Wait for the onboarding. Wait for someone to explain what needs to be fixed and how.
Agency means you stop waiting.
Here's what that looks like right now at HydraDB. My work goes beyond one lane. I do growth, and I also take tickets across the system, including parts I've never touched and have zero context on.
The old way to handle that would be: ask someone for a walkthrough, wait for their calendar to free up, sit through a knowledge transfer, and then maybe start.
What I actually do:
- I don't wait for anyone to tell me what's wrong. I read the ticket, read the code and the docs, and work out what the problem actually is and what else it touches.
- I use Claude to get context fast. I go from zero to "I understand how this part works and why" in hours, not weeks.
- I start shipping. Then I ask for feedback on something real, not for hand-holding on something I haven't tried.
This is the part people underestimate: AI has made learning almost free. With the right questions, you can understand any codebase, any domain or any system faster than ever before.
So the bottleneck isn't knowledge anymore. It's whether you'll start without being told to. Anyone can get the context now. Very few people act on it, and that gap is your advantage.
Agency is not the same as being reckless. Taking ownership doesn't mean ignoring people or breaking things. It means you show up with a first attempt, not a blank page. "Here's what I found, here's what I think we should do, does this look right?" is agency. "What should I do?" is waiting.
Try this: the next time you're stuck, spend 30 minutes trying to figure it out yourself before you ask anyone. When you do ask, bring what you've already tried.
3. Drive: The engine nobody sees
Curiosity and agency get you started. Drive keeps you going.
Drive is internal. Nobody checks whether you took that extra ticket from a domain you've never worked in. Nobody gives you marks for writing a "why" doc. Nobody notices the nights you spend understanding something properly when a surface-level answer would have got you through.
You do it because you want to. You want to be the person who understands the whole system, not one corner of it.
The honest truth is that if your motivation comes from outside (a manager, a grade, a deadline), it switches off the moment the outside pressure goes away. If it comes from inside, it keeps running.
But drive alone isn't enough. I learned this the hard way. In first year I had plenty of drive. I was going to build my own startup. A whole year went by, and I built nothing.
My drive had no direction. I wasn't curious about real problems, and I wasn't taking real action. I was just wanting. Drive only works when it's plugged into the loop.
Try this: pick one thing you'd learn even if nobody ever found out you learned it. That's where your drive lives. Start there.
Why this matters more at startups
Big companies are built to function even when people wait. There's a process, a manager and a ticket queue, and someone will eventually tell you what to do.
Startups don't have that luxury. There aren't enough people to hand-hold anyone. The work is messy, cross-functional and constantly changing. The people who thrive are the ones who:
- get curious about problems outside their job title
- pick them up without being asked
- keep going until it's actually done
That's why founders keep saying they want "high-agency people." They aren't asking for the smartest person in the room. They want the person who won't need to be managed.
The real reason others keep winning
Go back to the two people from the start.
The one who keeps winning isn't more talented. They just ask one more "why," start one day earlier and keep going one hour longer. That compounds every single week.
After a year, it looks like luck. After three, it looks like genius.
It's neither. It's a loop, and you can start it today.
Next up in FAFO: Skills aren't enough: why great products die without GTM, and so do great candidates.
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