This article glosses over the fact, known to us who have witnessed humans up close in business environments, that success is almost entirely political within an organization.
But survivorship bias means we assume all successful people hold a unique skill and wisdom that, if we only did the same, we'd find similar success.
Getting anything else requires opportunity. Even discovering where your talents lie takes resources.
And there's also genetic luck, not necessarily biological but also wealth and environment. Without that many talents are unknown or undeveloped. This kind of luck cannot be made.
Nobody can actually find people with undeveloped talents. You'd have to force them to try a wide variety of occupations, preferably early so that they can develop it.
The people we value are not just any talented, they're developed talents that have been noticed, and beyond that lucky geniuses.
I don't think anyone likes to admit that very few things in life are actually within our control, which makes it desirable to ascribe success to hard work, or intelligence, or whatever.
I started a consultancy that failed, was part of a small team with a moderately successful product, and now am part of a small team with a much more successful product.
All of that happened while former colleagues were working on much more successful products making a lot more money than I was.
In none of those cases was the outcome related to hard work, skill, or desire.
Sometimes you have the right people together in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you don't.
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None of which is to say that luck is the _only_ factor. Part of taking advantage of the luck is doing the best work you can, and honing your skills to the best of your ability, so that if the opportunity pops up you can grab it.
But just because you haven't had the success you've wanted doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you at all.
A smart person might be good at school and individual contribuitorship, and so believe that they should naturally be good at political games as well. But truly, politics takes a whole other set of smarts and the things that make you an excellent IC do not much overlap with things that make you good at the political game: charisma, selling, risk-taking, deep emotional intelligence, extroversion, strategic intuition, sociopathy, commanding presence.
Many smart engineers can't even see see that the game is being played or they realize it long after the match has been won. They are not the players, but the pieces on the board.
And I don't think it's accurate either to say that only fools love power. The need for power and status is deeply rooted in our evolution and psyche. To go back to Aristotle, man is the political animal.
For example, how do you react to inherently unfair situations, someone taking advantage of someone else? If you start picking on people good politicians will quickly “plausibility deniability” you out of the equation.
It’s much easier to accept (with a bit of anger) that you made a mistake in your program that bring defaced due to your “judgement being clouded by anger”.
You may be smart enough to even understand what you have to do, but it will take practice to do it well even if you understand it conceptually.
Many smart, principled people aren’t able to sufficiently lie to themselves or feel comfortable using ambiguous terms and/or outright lying, and that hampers their ability to covertly send and receive signals to others, so others who are successful at politics would do well to stay away from them. You have to compromise in order to get things done, but it doesn’t behoove you to lay out all of your cards for everyone to see.