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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

No. Luck and network is.

It's the only defining factor that can't be trained. Lucky beats smart. And if you take most of the really big successes like Facebook, Google etc. they where successful were a bunch of other people with equal grit and talent werent.

Many many people have grit and perseverence. Many people have talent, business understanding, good timing, excellent understanding of product and so on. And of course the more you play the game the better chance of success (statistically)

But when all is said and done unless we are talking about crony capitalism where you use political control to ensure success. Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful and others are not IMO.

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Luck just means you don't know the cause behind an effect.

Attributing success to "luck" is therefore simply putting the conditions for success outside your locus of control.

Attributing it to "grit" or some other personal quality puts the conditions for success within your locus of control.

For many people (myself included), the latter philosophy is more helpful as it makes success seem more deliberately achievable. Combined with a strong sense of agency, this philosophy can imbue its proponents with more confidence than those waiting for "luck" to happen (or who have given up on it happening).

That doesn't really change that of all those with grit those who are the luckiest win over those with grit who aren't.

You are trying to apply a method to being successful. Have grit and you will be succesful.

But having grit is only going to take you so far. Many people have grit. Luck will take you the rest.

The problem with you way of looking at things is that you are basically saying that those that don't have success don't have grit and therefore imply that it's their fault they don't. Which then create weird myths like the poor people are just lazy and don't have enough grit etc.

This is a lie with enough evidence to contradict. The fact that much of success is due to circumstances has been proven again and again. That does not mean that those that were successful din't also have grit. They did, they were also just the lucky ones with grit.

> you are basically saying that those that don't have success don't have grit

I don't remember saying that - please point out where I did.

Thinking about your success in terms of factors you can control can improve your chances of success if you draw confidence from that philosophy, and lots of people do. The appearance of confidence (and the correlation between confidence and appearing confident) has been shown to improve chances of success in various situations.

You are saying that by trying to force it into being a thing you can control.

And again many people have confidence that doesn't mean they all have success.

Keep in mind this article was trying to find the most encompassing reason for success.

There is none as encompassing as luck. All the others are a subset.

I said originally that luck is just the set of things you don't know about. By definition, it thusly can't be an "encompassing reason" (implied singular) - it's a name that refers to a collection of reasons (a subset of all possible reasons).

The discussions of confidence mindset and one's control over "success" are orthogonal, but I'm happy to discuss them.

Of course it can be an encompassing reason if that is the one that is to find in every case. Grit isn't, some are successful without grit, confidence isn't either some are successful while not confident.

But luck, luck you find in every single case.

The reason of success is luck luck in chance encounters which then leads to unpredictable outcomes amongst others success.

Sounds like a post-hoc fallacy to me. Or maybe a "just so story". You can always unwind somebody's story and find some point in the story where something happened that they could not necessarily have predicted, and cry "see, this person only succeeded because of luck". But we can't evaluate all the branches in the tree of outcomes that didn't happen exactly because they didn't happen.

If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened anyway.

And so your argument against what I am saying is that you don't like it to be that way.

Thats not an argument against what I am saying, that's just an opinion about the consequences of my argument.

What?!??? What you just said has nothing to do with what I wrote above.

Yes it does.

You don't like the idea that luck could be the actual all embedding factor of success.

"If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened anyway."

No you can't speculate that at all. But I would like to see you try.

You are just trying to insist that there is this path to success that can be taken without luck being involved which just isn't the case.

The question that was asked is whether grit is the one factor to become successful.

It's not, it can't be because if it was everyone who had grit would be successful they are not and so something else is needed. That thing is luck. Whether lucky that you were born with better of parents, higher IQ, extreme talent, went to the right school, meet the right people at the right time, have the right idea at the right time and so on.

Grit is only there to make you stay in the game long enough that you might end up being successful but it can never be the all encompassing factor that explains it all. Only luck can.

I really don't know what you're talking about. You're putting words in my mouth that I never said, and/or apparently intentionally misinterpreting my words. So with all due respect, I'm going to just drop out of this "discussion".

Luck does indeed mean you don't know the cause and effect and that those conditions are outside of your control.

That's because they are.

It may be helpful for you to maintain a belief that all of the conditions for success are within your control. That doesn't stop it from being a false belief.

It also won't be so helpful if you turn out not to be successful.

> all the conditions for success are within your control

I don't feel this is a necessary conclusion. In addition to accepting that some factors are outside your control, one must also realize that not all factors are weighted equally.

Why did you say it then?

You talked about choosing how to attribute success based on how 'useful' the belief is rather than how accurate.

If you are now trying to claim that luck is a factor but isn't weighted highly, this changes nothing about your desire to choose a belief that is false based on how motivating it is.

So there are a few orthogonal discussions here (largely due to lack of focus in my original comment, I'm afraid - haven't had my Sunday morning coffee yet).

Firstly, luck is a label for a subset of all factors on the outcome of a particular endeavor: specifically the subset that we aren't consciously aware of. I wanted to refute it as a singular reason for success (being, by definition, multiple reasons).

Secondly, I think an attitude that mostly dismisses the importance of luck (by emphasizing the importance of factors you can control) can help inspire confidence, an often-necessary and entirely-insufficient factor in successful human endeavors.

Thirdly, I make no claims as to knowing the single most heavily-weighted factor for success, or even the absolute weight of any given factors. I have lightly-held opinions about relative weights of various factors, based on my own experience and things I've read on the Internet.

This is a good set of distinctions.

I disagree with your refutation of 'luck' in point 1:

I agree that luck is an aggregate of 'all factors beyond your control', but I do not agree that conscious awareness is sufficient to place things into your control. Therefore, luck includes all factors beyond our control, whether we are aware of them or not. It's perfectly reasonable to group these together under a category. If your argument is that aggregate categories are invalid, then you must apply the same logic to 'success'.

More importantly, I agree with your second point, but I think it's harmful. Confidence based on self-deception is known as hubris, and leads to deceiving others and thus doing harm.

There is no need to deceive oneself in order to feel confident. That simply comes from an accurate sense of one's capabilities and the situation one finds oneself in.

I didn't mean to imply that being aware of conditions is sufficient for being in control of them. Obviously that would be wrong.

> Aggregate categories are invalid

In the search for a single factor, groups of factors seem like invalid entries.

Talking about the influence of chance on the outcome of a given set of circumstances in the universe, we're getting into free will / determinism here (and that's probably not going to be a terribly productive discussion) so I'll move on to your other point.

> I think it's harmful

I'll concede that in a vacuum you'd be right, but we're not in a vacuum. Making decisions based on factors you know about is different from consciously ignoring external factor outside your control or assuming that the factors you control are weighted more heavily. I think this conclusion of yours about my argument, though, is based on the "awareness" vs "control" confusion from above, so my overall conclusion is that we're on the same page.

> In the search for a single factor, groups of factors seem like invalid entries.

Grit is most certainly a group of factors.

Nobody is taking about free will or determinism. You are introducing that as a straw man.

We are not on the same page. Weights or not, you are advocating intentionally miss-attributing effects to causes that are under your control. Making reference to 'confusion' doesn't change that, and looks like another straw man.

Given that you advocate self-deception, your response seems consistent with your policy. I salute you for your consistency.

The problem with that viewpoint is that if you view people as fully free agents you start to attack an entire political/socioeconomic ideology that, sadly, runs our educational institutions and is closer to a religion than anything scientific. If you allow for the idea that any individual with a basic education and spirit can change the world, you unravel the idea that governments/corporations/institutions are more important than personal freedom, because we'd all be a bunch of broke, irresponsible losers without their "help".

ThomPete's comment was about learning from other people.

If you look at eg lottery winners, you could try to put getting the winning ticket into their `locus of control'. But it wouldn't tell you how to replicate that success.

You say "luck and network", I say "grit". I'm curious to know if there is some experiment we could perform that we both agree could settle the matter?

For example, imagine we assign 'grit' ratings to students who finish high school. Later we find that students with high grit scores tend to complete a university degree much more often than those with low grit scores. Would that change your mind about the importance of grit?

If you read the biographies of famous British people, you soon get used to reading that X or Y did okay/miserably at Oxford or Cambridge, but one day as they happened to bump into A or B who knew them from Oxford or Cambridge who said "I'm looking for someone to do something. Do you want to have a go?"

In the US, we already know from numerous surveys that after the first graduate intake, most software hires are made by personal recommendation - which is obviously going to exclude anyone who isn't part of a network.

So those are two examples of the value of networks.

As for "grit" - what does the word even mean? If someone gambles everything in startups and loses everything three times in a row before giving up, do they have grit or not?

Many people have grit, not all of them are successful. Some people don't have grit yet are still successful.

So obviously grit isn't the unifying thing that leads to success.

High Schools and Universities are by no metrics a measurement for success. And if you want to make them that you can start with the luck of whether you are born with rich parents or poor parents.

Of course grit is good to have, but it's not what define success.

Disagree. No matter how lucky you are. No matter who you or your family knows. If you give up quickly because you lack patience and/or grit, you are very unlikely to still be successful. How many startups succeed or become "unicorns" without at least a single pivot? Precious few. IMO grit is not the only factor of a successful person, but it sure as heck is one of the most common things you'll see in a successful person. A few examples.

Elon Musk, first generation immigrant, didn't come from money, is now a billionaire. An article was released this week interviewing Mr Musk where he plainly states he put his desk at the end of the assembly line in th Hawthorne Tesla factory. He then went on to mention how he has a sleeping bag and often sleeps there.

One of my favorites is to look at how many awful failures Abraham Lincoln went through. It would have broken most people, yet he soldiered on and ended up being one of the most important Presidents in US history: www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/failures.htm

Virtually everyone on HN knows how much of an obscene work-a-holic Steve Jobs was. He was also a first generation Syrian immigrant. Luck? He was fired as CEO from Apple before founding Pixar and NeXt. He still refused to give up. Grit doesn't mean being a work-a-holic though, it simply is extreme perseverance.

This inability to fail but sheer willpower is called grit. You're underestimating the power of raw unadulterated willpower if you take things outside of your comfort zone and to the extreme. Those people did, and your great grand children will likely hear their names.

Yet another take on Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Larry Ellison. The common thread in every one of these stories is grit, the inability to accept failure at face value and continue on until you succeed.

www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/how-mark-cuban-richard-branson-and-larry-ellison-failed-spectacularly-before-bec.html

I am not underestimating anything. You are simply missing the bigger point here because your understanding of luck is too simplistic.

Many people have grit not all of them become successful.

Steve Jobs was lucky he met Wozniak.

>Steve Jobs was lucky he met Wozniak

Luck here seems to be the lazy way of explaining events.

Rather, Steve Jobs likely felt the need to pair with a very smart engineer in order to do what he wanted, and came upon Wozniak.

It's not nearly as much as an ordered process as you imply; the fact Woz was in his immediate environment was the reason they teamed. Jobs didn't go on a process of finding a technical cofounder.

> ... and came upon Wozniak

There was only one Wozniak in the world at that time, remember that very few people had that knowledge, time (being very young) and hands-on experience on electronics.

Since I am replying deep on this thread, I just want to say that Steve Jobs had also some rare skills but they were very lucky to meet in the world. I don't know of any other country, beyond UK (ARM/BBC/Acorn/Sinclair/Amstrad), where you can have this early access to computers and electronic components.

This is known to be false. Wozniak and Jobs just happened to meet socially, and Jobs didn't know what was possible in computing until after he and Wozniak had already collaborated on other projects.

That is one point of view, but dare I say your understanding of luck is too all encompassing. Luck is really more of a probability, which can be explained mostly through an understanding of statistics. Steve Jobs wasn't lucky that he met Woz any more than Bill Gates was lucky for buying DOS for peanuts and then reselling it to IBM for many times more. Statistically, Steve would have met the right person if he tried hard enough, it just so happens he met Woz. Like I said previously, grit is one of the most common things (not the only) thing you'll find in successful people. If you get "lucky" that will certainly help, but it all comes down to intellect and drive (which we will call grit for this conversation). How many lottery winners or sportsball superstars end up broke 10 years later? They were lucky, what happened to them? They were idiots :)

Yes it's probatilistic just like success.

You are confusing what you would like to be the case (that you can predict success purely by human factors) with what is the case (that success is also probatilistic.

To claim that it's to encompassing makes no sense. If you want to truly understand instead of chanting some simplistic catchprases we entrepreneurs like to tell us self then it cant be encompassing enough.

Life is mostly probatilistic and we have much less control of our lifes than we would like to tell ourselves and each other.

...and Wozniak was also lucky he met Jobs. So I'm not sure what the point is. The subtext sounds like you're bitter that it's hard to become a billionaire on the the basis of engineering skills alone, and that you don't value certain qualities in other people unless you perceive yourself as also having those qualities. I mean, it's not really subtext even, it's practically dripping from your words.

Why would I be bitter I am doing just fine thank you. But yes of course Wozniak was also lucky he met Jobs. That doesn't change anything about my point. It actually just proves it even more.

You're reading way too much into what people are writing.

Great quote about this...

I’m a Great Believer in Luck. The Harder I Work, the More Luck I Have

Meh. "Luck" isn't something you can count on, sustainably, over a period of time. You can be "lucky" (whatever that means) at a point in time, but that only gets you so far. Was billg lucky that IBM hired MS to provide an OS for the PC, and that he was able to acquire QDOS from SCP for dirt cheap? Sure... but can you attribute everything since then to a continued, non-stop string of lucky events?

Now, you might ask, "well, what if the DOS thing didn't happen?" And the thing is, we'll never know, because it did happen. But if you believe that gates, ballmer, allen, etc. were smart, hard-working and talented, it seems likely they would still have ultimately been "successful" in some fashion, even if the story unfolded quite differently.

Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful

I don't know if we'll ever be able to actually quantify and measure that, but my suspicion is that grit/perserverance/will are at least as important as luck and/or network.

But keep in mind, there are many levels of "success". Life isn't as binary as "wound up homeless and sleeping in a gutter" vs. "wound up a billionaire CEO".

You make the same mistake as many other in this thread do.

You confuse two different things.

The question being asked is whether grit is the one trait to rule them all.

My answer to that is no it's not because most people who are successful have grit (but far from all) and many people who have grit are not successful.

And so I introduce another element, luck. Luck is as you say not something you can count on which is the very point here and actually proves both my point but introduces another important one.

You can't copy someone for success. It's not just a matter of having grit it's a matter of being lucky and having grit.

I don't know of any rule or law that implies that something can only be true if you can count on it.

A lottery winner who might keep playing again and again and one day win the lottery have grit but it's still luck if they win.

The question being asked is whether grit is the one trait to rule them all.

That's not the question I was addressing. I was addressing the extent to which one can attribute someone's success to "luck", and I argue that both grit AND luck can matter to one's outcomes.

A lottery winner who might keep playing again and again and one day win the lottery have grit but it's still luck if they win.

That's not even remotely relevant, as a lottery is very specifically a game of chance. Life involves an element of things you can't control, but it also involves a lot of things you can.

There are plenty of people with grit but without success. There are also plenty of people without grit and with success.

The lottery winners ability to buy the ticket to begin with is part of life. So yes it's actually relevant.

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