Comment by sokoloff
9 hours ago
> to some degree they believe that hard work and talent are related to success
Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
I do.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
Pick any of those 8 billion. Have them work half as hard. Have them have half as much talent. Do their outcomes remain the same , get better, or get worse?
You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).
I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
Can anyone benefit from working 10% harder or smarter? Undoubtedly. But success isn’t linear. It’s clear from the zeitgeist that the ultra-rich and powerful—past or present—aren’t working a million percent harder or smarter; their positions are more accurately explained by structural advantages. The first million might be 95% hard work and talent. The next million, probably a bit less so.
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Circumstances and luck are hugely important, but you have agency even if you don't have full control.
Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?
That's assuming that free will actually exists, which is an open question at this point.
What they want to believe is that their wealth is in proportion to their hard work and talent. But even ignoring luck, in a "tournament market", rewards are a strongly nonlinear function of inputs. Being no 2 in a market which is a natural monopoly has limited rewards.
You can believe it's positive, but not buy the idea that someone is millions of times more hard working or talented than ordinary people.
The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.
I don't personally know any people who believe that hard work and talent have zero positive correlation with success. However I know many people who believe that parents' socioeconomic status, genetics, luck, birthplace, and lack of scruples are all much more significant factors.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
My take: "winning the lottery" in a Facebook sense requires a floor of talent and work at the early stages, but the odds of winning don't correlate with how much talent and work exists, nor are continued talent and work required once a critical mass of success has occurred. External factors - being in the right place at the right time, having some cushion of familial wealth, etc - dominate once you're over the floor.
Neither talent nor hard work have anything to do with helping humanity.
The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.
The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.
It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.
But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.
All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
Are you sitting in a room while typing this? At the margin to reduce the odds of heart attacks, you should be at a walking desk outdoors, or ideally not arguing on the internet at all. Someone trying to "help humanity" should decide the threshold of acceptable self harm for you, just like you feel free to decide it for smokers; then after determining how you should live, they can declare that the alternatives make the world a worse place.
If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
> If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
Really? Telling people, "hey, don't give other's poison, that's bad"... is worse than giving other's poison? You actually believe that?
To give some context, I used to smoke. For a long time!
Nobody wants to smoke. The only people that want you to smoke are the people literally extracting value out of your rotting corpse.
Look, if you actually think those people are better, then whatever. Clearly this isn't something I can dispute or even try to argue against so who cares. Just... find some medication or something, I don't know. This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.
>Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
Do you actually believe that Mark Zuckerberg worked harder and is more talented than (rounded to the nearest person) every other person on the planet?
But negative, but success is correlated to success so much that at some point work and talent are irrelevant. Let's say Zuck has an idea to make something. He has enough people around him discussing ideas that he can basically pick one he likes and it's already pre-filtered. Then he can give it to basically anytime he chooses, with arbitrary skills threshold and resource allocation. Then he's got a whole support network to make it work. And if it falls? A loss of a few millions means nothing to him and he can try again.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
A lot of people seem to think of success as the sum of a bunch of independent variables: positioning + insight + hard work + talent + luck - scruples ... Then, they argue about the relative magnitude of each term.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
I think you can certainly make some of your own luck via hard work, but there is a difference between actually making on your own, and starting on 3rd base.
At school I used to play marbles. I had no skill whatsoever so I did "set ups" where I put a marble down and other kids threw theirs from a standard distance to hit it. If they missed the marble was mine. More valued marbles got more chances.
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m), but I think you then need a big injection of luck to take you from wealthy to ultra wealthy.
> I suspect talent and hard work are pretty well correlated with becoming wealthy (say >$10m)
Statistically, no.
Nah bro all the poors are just lazy bro /s
How many are born into it? If I think about the people that I personally know who are worth 8-figures or more they were each born into wealth. I wouldn't ever say that they also don't work hard and have talent, because they truly do, but it doesn't apply to their wealth.
Talent and hard work at what is what's missing from these discussions, I think.
I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.
I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.
I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea, 95% implementation".
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
> Facebook in the mid 00's
Timing plays a huge role in this too.
I think it was a Tutankhamun quote, paraphrase "it's 5% the idea and the implementation, 95% having been born into a family who are very wealthy and who also happen to do a good job instilling the innate belief in you that dominating in business is everything".
There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.
As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.
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I have no idea. What I do know is that there's no degree of hard work or talent that will make me a billionaire.
I'd argue that every billionaire has a talent for persuading capable people to join them on a journey.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
This makes me think of early employees in a startup that goes through an IPO or acquisition. Skill and talent get you through the door but heaps and heaps of luck lead to that event. Having personally won a (minor) startup lottery I got to see the luck factor first hand.
Meh. If you get lucky once and make a chunk of money or were born into money, people will associate that success with skill rather than luck, and follow you hoping that luck repeats. You don't need the skill if you can point at a big house and a nice car.
"if hard work was all you needed to get rich, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire".
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
"The horse was the best worker in the kolkhoz, but never became its chairman". Heck, there is an entirely too depressing to read (but probably mostly correct) theory about how the office politics work [0] and I imagine it roughly translates to the other fields as well. Putting lots of efforts into some random thing most likely won't make you rich and/or powerful. It's putting the effort into becoming rich and powerful that gets you there — but that takes a rather particular personality and skill set.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I agree with you that there is positive correlation.
I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)
Enormous numbers of humans work hard and are talented at the things they do. Hard work and talent gets you a middle-class existence, at least if you were born in the right country and with the right resources to go to university, etc.
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
> The overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
> dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025
Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.
Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.
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> Does anyone actually believe
> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.
Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.
Yes, it's totally sensible that someone would setup an experiment to prove a conjecture in a comment thread that will be forgotten in a couple hours. Totally reasonable ask.