Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __jal | Hacker News Reader

I found myself nodding along the whole article.

First, let me say that I am happy where I ended up. I'm successful, enjoy my work, and when I compare my personal income with our family income when I was growing up, it is an absurd multiple.

We were a very poor family in a poor part of the South. I went to a top-10 small private university on a full ride, felt completely alienated and never quite figured out how to function in that environment. I dropped out and moved to San Francisco at what turned out to be a very good time (early 90's), and once Netscape dropped, discovered nobody else knew what they were doing with this web thing either, and more or less faked it until I made it.

At the same time, I have had and do have ideas that others have executed on, that I know I could have made a go at, if only…

The if only list is long, and most of it comes back to self-imposed limitations that I can trace back to how I grew up. Frequently it relates to economic security, but there are other habits of thought that stop me from even getting to worrying about that.

One big one is that I never learned to think about entrepreneurship. A big lesson hammered into me growing up was the importance of "finding a good job", not figuring out how to make my own.

I did start a company in my mid-30s, and we did OK, until we didn't. And that failure (I think) had nothing to do with the habits of thought of a poor kid. But failing in a similar way in my 20s would have left me in a position to learn from that and try again, something I'm unlikely to make a go at 10 years later. I do little things for side income, but those are hobbies.

So it ends up being this thing that doesn't really bother me at this point, but does leave me to wonder what would have happened if I had picked parents from a very different walk of life.

And I am quietly amused when people tell me how they built everything themselves "after a seed from Dad", or "with a great connection I made through a family friend" or similar. Those are impossible blockers for a lot of people, even if they get over some of the habits of mind better than I did.

I've known deca-millionaire trust fund kids who ended up broke (or dead).

I've known immigrants who started with nothing and ended up fantastically independently wealthy.

And the vast, vast majority of people who settle somewhere near the middle.

What nobody teaches you is: it's all about luck.

Below that, the fine print: the harder you work and the more you sacrifice, the luckier you will get.

''If only'' works both ways. If only - then I would have been successful in some way. If only - then I wouldn't have met the partner who I fell in love with. It works both ways but people tend to overweight the negative (regret) and underweight the positive (gratitude). All you can do (young, old, or in between) is get up every day, be realistic about where you are and where you want to be, and keep moving forward.

I agree it's a lot about luck and work, but I think you are missing an essential key to success: relationships.

luck is a big factor but being in the right place at the right time maximizes the probability of getting lucky

"Being in the right place at the right time" is a vast majority of what luck brings you.

no, I don't think of it that way. As an example, if you moved to Silicon Valley in 1999 and made it a point to try to get a job at a cool startup, you might have at least had a chance to end up at Google as an early employee. But you had no such opportunity if you moved to Wichita, Kansas because you thought it was cheaper, or whatever the reason.

    it's all about luck

Bullshit. Luck sure goes a long way, but so do working very, very hard and smart and making course corrections and constantly doing things people say will fail.

99% of the time, when you do something that lots of smart people say will fail, you fail. People look at that 1% and conclude that if you just keep whacking your head against a brick wall, it will eventually turn into gold, completely ignoring the combination of smarts, habits, and the sheer dumb luck that are actually behind success. But the gutters are full of ambitious failures.

Ambition != working hard and smart

Spoken like a critic. Not a producer. I know lots and lots of smart people who know how to criticize but not to create.

Yeah, that's a standard rhetorical catch-22. Virtuous people always succeed, so anyone who doesn't succeed is by definition not virtuous--the system works! It's the same kind of thinking as "If God doesn't answer your prayers, it's your fault for not praying hard enough," or "Communism cannot fail, it can only be failed."

Nothing to do with virtue. I have seen bad people succeed with the same techniques. Please read more carefully before you make irrelevant remarks. This does not serve you well.

"Virtuous" was obviously shorthand for "working very, very hard and smart and" etc.

Fortune favors the bold

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