>It turned out the good performance, not the crappy performance, was a fluke.
>In several encounters since then, X has reverted to type- studied mediocrity.
>That sounds pessimistic, but it's not.
>The X's in the world create huge opportunities for anyone who can simply do what he says he'll do.

I loved such guys, specially as competition. Once we walked over his corpse into the customer's office, everything was easy and the customer liked everything we did. My favorite example was one who called himself "Nightmare software", because it was true. He was a data entry clerk at my previous job, the fastest guy I ever saw (because it was data ENTRY so he could type the numbers at light speed and then just press enter - singlehandedly (literally) entering 200 invoices in just a couple of hours), liked to peek over programmers' shoulders and became self-taught programmer. The naive artist of sorts.