Comment by tsunamifury

Big difference is comparing to sports is millions of people can see with their own eyes the performance of a player in arena. All motivated media can't create a narrative of brilliance when bad performance is there to see.

In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.

Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.

> He has designed 4 consumer prodocts that a good portion of humanity use every day.

Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?

It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.

Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.

While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.

For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.

To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.