Hacker News Reader

Comment by FfejL | Hacker News Reader

I find that a very weak analogy. The house wins in Vegas over the long haul because the odds have been tilted in their favor. Any one hand of blackjack is luck, but the house winning over the course of a million is a mathematically certainty. It has nothing to do with 'not giving up.'

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.

View on HN

It isn't clear just what Bezos did before Amazon, but he engaged in a number of different occupations.

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 (!).

> Most musicians wander the desert for years before becoming "overnight" successes.

No, most musicians wander the desert and never end up leaving the desert.

This explanation of survivor bias is about the best and most accessible I've found.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/path-of-a-hero

Can we say survivorship bias? There are millions of hardworking and talented individuals who try repeatedly and end up with at most moderate success.

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.

Timing is is easier if you try all the time

Exactly. If you wait for the wind to blow before building a sailboat, you'll never catch that "lucky wind".

The people who quit before they start fail 100% of the time.

>95% of people that use this quote end up with a lot less time and money than those who quit.

"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win AND never quit are idiots"

-I have yet to find the origin of this.

You only get perfect timing if you see things coming miles ahead. That's probably what they did better than anyone else.

This reminds me of something coaches often said. "Practice doesn't make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect."

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.

If "moderate success" is achievable without extreme fortune, then that's a perfectly acceptable target to aim for. I agree that trying to become a billionaire is a fool's errand but if you're trying to become a millionaire, you'll end up more likely to be a billionaire.

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.

Ray Kroc didn't found McDonalds, Richard and Maurice _McDonald_ did.

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.

> Richard and Maurice _McDonald_ did

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.

> And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor?

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.

> 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.

> What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor?

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.

But you can't just study what the successful people have done, you have to study what actually makes them different from everyone else. Think of it as a Type I error:

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.

> what actually makes them different from everyone else

They don't suffer from "I cannot succeed so why bother trying."

That's a bit of a strawman here, no? I'm saying "not all things that successful people do are the reasons they succeeded and successful people tend to suffer from hindsight and survivor bias so it's tricky to tell what led to their success." I said nothing about it being impossible or futile to try to succeed.

So do millions of other ambitious people. Many of us do achieve moderate success.

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?

In the 70s I was with a company that designed SBCs. They had everything needed to be an Apple - talent, money, expertise. Everything but a Jobs who saw the opportunity.

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.

> 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.

Maybe we're in agreement. You fit my definition perfectly - success for sure (even your own wiki page), but never that massive breakout. And hindsight isn't great for predicting those once-in-a-lifetime convergences. Maybe Steve Jobs himself could have led your 70's era company to be Apple instead. Or maybe the happy set of coincidences would have played out differently and it would have been a moderate player but not the most valuable company in the world.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com