And when the billioneth monkey writes shakespeare, a dozen pop-psychology books will be written about its "secret". Add: Survivorship bias.

There's lots of "brilliant" worship in the mainstream and especially among techies. We strive to be geniuses too, never mind one falls and another replaces him. And luck? That's the opposite of what we want to believe.

Right. Outlier success is heavily driven by randomness, sometimes with a real differentiator edge thrown it. It doesn't last because randomness is never permanently positive over a sufficient sample size and whatever edge someone may have is studied and copied or counteracted once they start to outpace everyone else.

But to be fair, outlier success in many fields is rarely possible without some initial high level of skill and knowledge in the first place.

Exactly. This has been a well-known phenomenon for over a century.

As mentioned in the article:

> More likely it is “regression to the mean”, or in simple terms, a return to business as usual.