I think it is the other way around. You know nothing better then work your ass off just to make sure that you have bigger car/yacht/jet than that neighbor of yours. Some people (myself including) do not give rat's ass about it. So while the world "competes extremely" I do what I want.
My main issue with this narrative that work hard != success is that it looks at the upper tier of a profession. You don't have to be a CEO or a professional hockey player to be successful. It's trendy to say this for some reason, but the people saying it don't believe it. The author of the post literally has 3 degrees (undergrad, masters and MBA). He works as VP and head of M&A of a $5.2bn company. He doesn't believe this crap. He's worked hard and probably prides himself on being successful. But he peddles this crap on LI for some reason to discourage others from having any hopes or ambitions. Why?
And it's backed up by mostly BS:
> How about the role that luck plays in career success? Three Italian professors created a model to track the success of 1,000 individuals over a series of lucky and unlucky events spanning 40-year careers. The result?
Papers like this get thrown around a lot as evidence of something. I was curious about this one since I don't know how you can measure "talent". He made it sound like a longitudinal study. If you actually read the paper [0], it amounts to nothing more than someone creating a model of the world as they think it is, run the simulation, say the world looks different than the simulation I just made up, so something.
Here are their assumptions:
> We consider N individuals, with talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.) normally distributed in the interval [0, 1] around a given mean mT with a standard deviation σT , randomly placed in fixed positions within a square world (see Figure 1) with periodic boundary conditions (i.e. with a toroidal topology) and surrounded by a certain number NE of ”moving” events (indicated by dots), someone lucky, someone else unlucky (neutral events are not considered in the model, since they have not relevant effects on the individual life)
It makes for a nice headline, but this isn't science.
What about if Steve Jobs didnt go to the computer club that day and met Wozniack, do you think he would have built the largest tech company anyway, just by result of his hard work?
What about two people, one unlucky born in Liberia and a lucky one born in Switzerland. Both work hard 8 hours a day breaking rocks at the quarry. What results do they get out of the work, and why they arent the same as they are both working as hard?
> You don't have to be a CEO or a professional hockey player to be successful
That person breaking rocks at the quarry would be a lot less successful if he didn't work hard. Having this cynical attitude that hard work is not rewarded is a real sign of privilege. It's not an option for most people, and their life would be considerably more difficult if they don't work hard. Not everyone has parents nearby with a spare basement
“Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”
The one thing I’ve noticed of all successful people is they used some form of arbitrage at some point, and this can often be mistaken for luck. This is what makes the difference from a person that has merely worked hard.
(Not OP). that arbitrage comment is so vague as to be devoid of meaning.
But an example of someone becoming rich over a single bet would be George Soros: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/george-soros-ban...
to him, perhaps the result was so clear as to be considered arbitrage
One just happens. Like just walking down the street and you find 5 dollar on the curb. That's like what country you were born, may makes things easier or harder for you.
The second type of luck you have to buy a ticket to get a chance to win. Like the lottery, you can only win if you buy a ticket. That is your hard work, education etc. It enables you to be in the lucky draw and/or increases your chances, but still not guaranteed.
You're right! I recently landed a big client because I had done some work with them while working with an agency when in between jobs and their relationship fell through. They contacted me and being a fs dev (years of exp) I was able to pretty much take on all their work and eventually formed my own company around this.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 41.4 ms ] threadAnd it's backed up by mostly BS:
> How about the role that luck plays in career success? Three Italian professors created a model to track the success of 1,000 individuals over a series of lucky and unlucky events spanning 40-year careers. The result?
Papers like this get thrown around a lot as evidence of something. I was curious about this one since I don't know how you can measure "talent". He made it sound like a longitudinal study. If you actually read the paper [0], it amounts to nothing more than someone creating a model of the world as they think it is, run the simulation, say the world looks different than the simulation I just made up, so something.
Here are their assumptions:
> We consider N individuals, with talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.) normally distributed in the interval [0, 1] around a given mean mT with a standard deviation σT , randomly placed in fixed positions within a square world (see Figure 1) with periodic boundary conditions (i.e. with a toroidal topology) and surrounded by a certain number NE of ”moving” events (indicated by dots), someone lucky, someone else unlucky (neutral events are not considered in the model, since they have not relevant effects on the individual life)
It makes for a nice headline, but this isn't science.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf
What about two people, one unlucky born in Liberia and a lucky one born in Switzerland. Both work hard 8 hours a day breaking rocks at the quarry. What results do they get out of the work, and why they arent the same as they are both working as hard?
> You don't have to be a CEO or a professional hockey player to be successful
That person breaking rocks at the quarry would be a lot less successful if he didn't work hard. Having this cynical attitude that hard work is not rewarded is a real sign of privilege. It's not an option for most people, and their life would be considerably more difficult if they don't work hard. Not everyone has parents nearby with a spare basement
Branch Rickey
False dichotomies are lazy.
There are two types of luck.
One just happens. Like just walking down the street and you find 5 dollar on the curb. That's like what country you were born, may makes things easier or harder for you.
The second type of luck you have to buy a ticket to get a chance to win. Like the lottery, you can only win if you buy a ticket. That is your hard work, education etc. It enables you to be in the lucky draw and/or increases your chances, but still not guaranteed.
If you work hard and have a positive mindset, you're much more likely to get lucky than you would by just slacking off or having a negative mindset.