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Comment by willturman

1 day ago

> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?

Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?

Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

is grit not required to make it to land in the survivorship bias pool? If your first failure is too hard on you and you quit, then, by definition, you can't succeed. Maybe grit doesn't count when everything goes your way always. I'm not sure anyone has experienced success without grit, but I could be entertained by anecdotes.