For example, is it luck that the Vegas casinos make money on gambling? Nope, even though the outcome of each individual hand is luck.
Many people who are successful went through repeated failures to get there. They never gave up.
If the only difference between a successful casino strategy and an unsuccessful one is failure to control for some variable, then the variance in that variable will yield some very successful casinos, and some unsuccessful casinos, regardless of the actual expected value of the casino business.
That kind of notable exception?
What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor?
Perhaps more to the point, Amazon was the first company Bezos founded. MicroSoft was Gates' first, and Michael Dell founded Dell while still at school. In what sense did these men go through repeated failures?
That's not to say these aren't exceptional men. Of course they are. But luck played a huge role in their success.
Becoming a billionaire will rarely be the result of one lucky decision, but rather the result of thousands of individual decision where a larger than average number of them turn out to be "lucky".
I would think that the way to tilt the odds in your favor would be to study and listen to those who have successfully done this, and see if you can get some hints to how they made all these decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors
Let's say you interview 10 billionaires and 9 say they did X. Does X increase the likelihood of being a billionaire? You don't know until you look at the entire population of people TRYING to be billionaires. If X occurs in 90% of the billionaire population but 99% of the non-billionaire strivers population, then what you conclude is that in fact NOT doing X makes you more likely to succeed.* You can't study what makes you successful without including people who aren't successful.
* Yes I know that the difference between 90% and 99% is hard if not impossible to measure in a sample of 10.
They don't suffer from "I cannot succeed so why bother trying."
Walter - do you think there's a vast gap in ability between you and Zuckerberg? Or better yet, between you and Dustin Moskovitz? (He's worth 10.4 billion).
Or did they just also happen to be in the right place at the right time?
Hence I'm not a billionaire.
In the years since, over and over and over, hindsight tells me I was in the right place at the right time, but was either too blind to see the opportunity or too chicken to take the risk. It's a running joke in my family.
Ironically, the ventures I have been successful at were all pooh-poohed by everyone when I started them.
If you can get up out of bed in the morning, have a brain that works, and live in a free country - you have all the luck you need to be successful.
In general I agree with this, though of course there are exceptions. One of my brothers had a mental disability that required him to have 24/7 care. His main caretaker was my mother, and as a sibling I helped where I could. This was bad "luck" not only for my brother, but also my mother. She was always ambitious but my brother's disability needs took over most of her time and energy, leaving her with very little to pursue any financial/career success. Anyway, that's just one example.
I think there are many clear paths in the U.S. to becoming a millionaire. Most U.S. citizens can pick up a career guide and learn about high-paying careers and what it takes to get into it. I did this with becoming a software engineer. Then it was just a matter of following the well-beaten path. Go to school -> get computer science degree -> take up one of the many opportunities -> properly manage finances and save/invest.
Of course, this all requires some degree of luck. I was born a white male in America. This alone put me off to a great advantage over someone born in a poor corrupt country. I haven't had any known health or genetic issues, which is another fortunate circumstance.
Like you said, as long as you have a reasonable/average amount of health, then there are a lot of opportunities. As individuals we just need the courage and be willing to put in the work to make it happen. But let's never get too full of ourselves, because there is luck involved with any success.
I too consider myself moderately successful (without quite your track record). I've also been close to those who do experience that next level of success. They are uniformly talented but their huge successes were once-in-a-lifetime. Some of them even tried to replicate and they achieved only moderate success the second time - what you'd expect of someone of their talent - despite their obvious advantages from having done it once before.
Traf-O-Data was Gates' first company. There's a reason nobody has heard of it :-)
Ray Kroc failed for 30 years before founding McDonalds. Colonel Sanders tried many things, and did not succeed until he was 62. T. Edison failed constantly.
Most musicians wander the desert for years before becoming "overnight" successes.
Mark Cuban had many attempts at business, including being a disco dance instructor (!).
No, most musicians wander the desert and never end up leaving the desert.
The number of breakouts is so small that there isn't any statistical significance to what those individuals did differently. Mostly, they happened to execute well - but nailed the timing perfectly. Bill's success with MS-DOS (on the eve of the PC revolution), the rise of car culture and suburbia for McDonald's. And Cuban got really lucky at the height of the bubble.
I'm not saying they weren't smart or talented. But to perfectly nail timing requires the ability to predict the future. And if you read "The Road Ahead, 1st ed.", it's obvious even the talented BillG isn't much better at this than anyone else.
Which leaves us with luck.
-I have yet to find the origin of this.
Sure luck has something to do with it, but if you're learning from your mistakes & constantly improving, you're chances of success get better all the time. It's just like throwing a ball at a hoop or any other thing in life. After a while you quit making as many mistakes that lessen your chance of success.
I've heard Mark Cuban say numerous times how incredibly lucky he was with Broadcast.com. But he's unapologetic in his belief that he'd be successful. He knew he'd become a millionaire and the work it took to get there, coupled with the right product and the right time is what made him a billionaire.
I have to agree with that. I'm sure Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc. would all be successful if Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon didn't become incredible successes. They just wouldn't have been as successful.
Also survivor bias but also you obviously will never accomplish anything without trying.
I think it is entertaining to try to find the abstraction that leads to success but it's probably more harmful than helpful to believe in something like that. Just do the best you can with what you have. Maybe it leads to success, maybe it doesn't but don't let that affect your perception of it, you did your best and that's all anyone can expect of you.
Technically you are correct, but that business was going nowhere under their management. It was Ray Kroc that made McDonald's in the practical sense of the word.
Study how to run a business and study the market one wishes to enter. Make a plan. Work every day to move forward with that plan.
Right there is already way ahead of most other people.
What lowers the odds to pretty much zero is doing nothing because you believe it's all luck so why bother.
You keep saying things like this, but nobody else is arguing that.
It seems like this whole area reeks of astrology.
Admittedly in the startup world and the early days of computing this was probably more true, that factors outside of your control influenced your success. It happened to be the case that computers were something people wanted to invest in, even though some random hacker in his garage was just doing it for fun. The volatility plus the hype exaggerated any effort that was put into the game in the first place, thus making the coupling between effort and success seem discontinuous. But a human still had to motivate themselves to build the thing.
"How did my actions create positive exposure and how did I capitalize on things that appeared to me?" would be the operative questions here, not "what was the sequence of actions I controlled the world with?"
Most successful people are not statisticians, nor drawing their conclusion from a sample larger than, say, themselves and perhaps the few successful friends closest to them, when giving the sort of advice in the OP. Moreover, given how easily humans tend to conflate "What did successful people do?" with "What did successful people compared to the set of people who tried to be successful?", the risk of bad advice is even larger. At best, you're hearing white noise, but more than likely, you're hearing a case of survivorship bias (even worse than white noise).