What about all those people who intend for their invention/creation/whatever to be successful but fail (Obv. everyone as I doubt anyone would intend to fail)? I think you are completely missing how often peoples endeavours fail and that those are you see as being successful are such a small minority compared to the large population that the only factor that differentiates those who are successful to some extent versus those who are EXTREMELY successful is luck. 99% of the population can show hard work, determination, passion, dedication or whatever you can think of - but in reality only 1% of 1% of the population will be financially free (Yeah sure financially free means different things to different people. but its just for the point im trying to make).

The reason something fails is because you failed. It has nothing to do with luck.

Ok, lets remove the word fail and replace it with comparatively less successful (I am using fail as anything except financially free, but this is for clarification). That has nothing to do with luck? The point im trying to get at is your determination and will for success can get you only so far. It's like saying in poker you "had a feeling you would win" or that "you imposed your will on the cards to go your way" - wanting to be successful won't bring you success. Would Tom Dwan be as successful he is now if he started his poker career running bad? NO! There are so many people here on 2+2 that would be as successful as Dwan if they had his luck. Yes he puts in hard work etc etc but so many people out there put as much if not more work into their game just to see mediocre results.

We seem to be talking at cross purposes.

I did not say he was lucky to create Napster, I said he was lucky that he was doing something for personal reasons that happened to be highly lucrative.

Under your theory as I understand it he would have been roughly as successful if he had been born say 20 years before, which seems clearly false if we're assuming that he really did just code Napster on a lark rather than from the desire to get wealthy.

But honestly this luck stuff is just not interesting to discuss. My biggest issue is the idea that people who emphasize the role of luck in success are invariably jealous. It is just wrong, and surprisingly facile coming from you.

I have no idea who Tom Dwan is and my poker experience is quite dated but if you can't afford to run bad that is your fault for not having an adequate bankroll.

Further, you seem to be attributing some sort of new age crap about willing yourself to success. Will has nothing to do with it -- success is about making the correct decisions and nothing more. If you fail at something it is because you made the wrong decisions.

You are ignoring the fact that what we are interested in is heavily influenced by what is valued by society. There is a reason all my friends and I grew up playing hockey and not cricket. The only reason he was into computers and the internet is because the intenet was important to society.

He wouldn't have invented Napster but odds are he would have invented something else. It might not have been as successful and given valuation models were very different twenty years before the tech boom he might not have gotten so much money for doing it but the probability of him doing something else that put him above the curve is pretty high

I didn't say anything about jealous. I said rationalizing.

Okay since the luck stuff is apparently boring.

1) Being tall
2) Being white
3) Being male
4) Being better than average looking

Recipe for success!

#5 can be many attributes but those are the top 4 for success imo.

I guess you can add that stuff like hard working or whatever but that stuff you can't really measure. God knows I'm not the hardest worker in my school work but I do end up being in the top 5% of my classes nearly every time. Best part about it though, is I am one of the top 4 I listed there (male!!!). hahahaha oh I love it I must be a luckbox or it could be just because I have a weiner.

There are a lotta ugly rich people.

Henry it is luck though. Luck in the sense of being in the right place and the right time. The guy who invented napster, managed to create his product at the right time before anyone else did. Had he been one year younger, someone likely would have made it before him. Had he been 4 years older, the internet would have probably been too small for napster to expand like it did.


The story behind Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is very similar, Malcolm Gladwell went over their backgrounds in the book Outliers. They had incredible strokes of luck to put them in the position to be as wealthy as they are.

Wow, then there is hope for me to be successful if I am ugly! Time to work on these attributes then.

^^

Oh yeah, didn't Bill Gates drop out of school? Same with that guy from Dell? Would you advise your kid to drop out of school? I would hope not. Look at all the people who drop out of school to pursure their dreams, Gates and Dell were just very fortunate to not go bankrupt before they went boom.

Paul Allen, so unlucky to have lymphoma...

luck is important and especially at the start of your life where you just depend 100% on someone else. you cant just skip that part and then say oh those people with 30 or something with good education and somewhat developed soft skills could do it elsewhere as well.

The reason you see that as luck is because you are thinking of the particular window of opportunity that led to them being successful wouldn't have happened -- I don't disagree with that but they just would have achieved success in some other way.

Unfortunately I think Gladwell's books are horrible so have never read Outliers. Given Gates was already crushing his peer group when he was a teen I think it is going to be pretty hard to argue that luck was a factor in his success.

Never said that. I said we adjust for the natural lottery by measuring success relative to your starting point. How much did you improve from where you started.

Further, just because something is harder is no excuse to fail -- you just have to do more to succeed and if you don't then you have no one to blame but yourself. There are some situations where the starting position does make it almost impossible to make much of yourself but that is rare. In the majority of the cases of people born into disadvantage people just use that as an excuse to rationalize their failure.

this is just incredibly stupid stuff. tell that bs starving kids in africa. you opinion can and is already statistically proven wrong.

this also seems questionable to me, obv there would be a correlation of success for certain people in different environments but the variance would be just huge imo. the general common trait for success would be good health i guess.
i mean adolf hitler was in a way an extremely successful person (getting to the top of a world power). you think that man would have any reasonable shot a success nowadays? before winning at politics, he totally failed at life, was in the lowest rank in the military and so on.

there is a reason why ppl who work hard generally are better off than those who don't w/ in same environment.

I am not comparing a hard working non-English speaking mexican to a lazy grinder who does well @ NL1k. I am comparing a lazy mexican to a hard working mexican, a lazy NL1k grinder to a hard working NL1k grinder.

Now... I guess if you are a lazy 1k grinder, then you are prolly luckier than the hard working immigrant in the short run. But I am not sure if the lazy grinder's success would be > the hard working immigrant's in the long run.

I see both sides of the luck argument - lucky enough to be in the right situation, smart and aggressive enough to make the most of your talents and resources and exploit the hell out of the opportunity.

Cardrunners seems like as good an example of this as any.

So your measuring success as what you achieve under your circumstances correct?
bad circumstances=bad luck...

well by that definition I agree success has nothing to do with luck.

Thats cause definitions are confused and you using SIGNIFICANT factor is confusing cause by your definition it has zero factor.


Also by your definition using billionaires as success examples is confusing cause wealth although correlated has nothing to do with success.

Also so what if the decisions were deliberate what matters is how would he rank to other people in his shoes for all we know he could be below EV in that aspect ranking him worse than most people IOW unsuccessful.

quoted back a page "if 10,000 people play Russian roulette 70 years later handful millionaires etc...

So even if they rank high on your success rating there is 0 variance? But what if they get into real estate

... heh

This needs more love.

^

wil318466, I was just kidding...for the most part.

You can call it luck if you want but basically it is just the outcome of natural lottery -- if you are born into poverty things will be harder but we will also consider you a success if you achieve less.

No. There is still some luck involved. There are things that happen that are completely outside your control and which are so unlikely that you not factoring them happening is a rational and reasonable choice.

Desert based wealth is pretty much a perfect proxy for success in the context we are discussing.

Makes no sense.

?

There is always the possibility someone could die -- I could be on my way to dinner and a drunk driver takes me out but assuming we just ignore stuff like that and assume the individual lives and is not incapacitated then yes.

That is in no way accurate. What you look like is very significant.

This is a joke. right?

No it's not a joke. What you look like is very important in the corporate world. Have you not heard of the correlation between height and corporate (and political) success?


Wtf is going on in this thread?

No. Anyone who thinks physical appearance is not a major factor with respect to income has never worked in a corporate setting. Applying for jobs out of law school your physical appearance was equivalent to about half a letter grade. If your appearance was really bad then you had no chance -- I remember one student who had an A average and an MBA from a good school and he didn't get placed at a respectable firm because he looked like a troll.

There are plenty of studies that show there is a positive correlation between both height/income and physical attractiveness/income but much easier to just look at people who have top legal and finance jobs and look at their peers at the less prestigious firms and it will be pretty self-evident.

When it comes to entrepreneurship physical appearance is of less importance but still a factor. There will still be junctions where you'll desire something that will be at someone's discretion and people work hard to please the attractive so if you send in two equivalent entrepreneurs with identical businesses and one is attractive and the other isn't the attractive individual has a higher probability of getting a yes than the unattractive individual.

Not again. First you said intelligence and success/wealth had NO correlation and now you say

It looks like you haven't learned much yet. You're making almost exactly the same mistake again.

Saying "what you look like is not that important" is a defensible position (I think it is wrong, but defensible). Saying it has "*zero* consequence" is absurd.