Comment by jocaal
2 days ago
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
2 days ago
Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.
Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.
There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.
for instance if that social network film by david fincher hadnt come out, would we have even heard of this mark guy?
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What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.
Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.
What risk?
Once you go deep enough into a personal passion project like that, you run a serious risk of flunking out of school. For most people that feels like a big deal. And for those of us with fewer alternatives in life, it's usually enough to keep us on the straight and narrow path.
People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.
I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness
Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
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Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
>luck, skill and hard work.
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
> I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded
Succeeded in making something comparable to facebook? Who are those?
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