A little bit of slope makes up a lot for y-intercept!

Here's what Feross shared in an interview to Princeton Startup TV:

One of his lessons that he told us about was if somebody is better than you at something - their skill level is up here and yours is here - you shouldn’t let that make you sad or feel like you’ll never be able to catch them. Because a little bit of slope makes up a lot for y-intercept. So if your slope is this, and their slope is like this - maybe they’re a software engineer, they’re not learning anything new, or they’re just doing their job but they seem sort of god-like in that they’re so good. But you learn really fast, really quickly, and can catch up to them and start to pass them if you keep your slope very high. So the most important thing is the slope and not the y-intercept.