Success is almost by definition a hindsight measure. You can only work backwards from it, but never guarantee a forward path into it.
Guarantee, no. Anyone could be hit by a bus tomorrow. But it is clear that one can greatly increase their odds of success. For example, learning a job skill. Learning how to manage money. Living below your means. Associate with successful people instead of losers. Ditching the victim mentality.
One can also greatly decrease odds of success by, say, dropping out, playing video games all day, hittin' the crack pipe, etc., and adopting the victim mentality.
Certainly having goals (particularly ones that retain a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle) can help people avoid negative outcomes.
Luck is still a factor, it's just a matter of minimizing it.
Some people work their asses off starting a company, and it never takes off, and some dude who barely knows how to program runs into someone at a party and gets hired for a million dollars to build a dumb website.
This should be written somewhere with huge letters and be the final end of that otherwise endless discussion.
People in HN are really baffling to me in how they underplay luck and overplay effort all the time. And I've seen what you said, on both extremes, like 50 times in my life so far at least.
I don't why that is. A lot of us know that the ego is our brain's top priority but nobody really knows why is that the case.
This also leads to rich people producing various misguided essays in which they are asserting stuff that's way outside their area of expertise -- but since they are rich and popular, many people gulp them as a holy gospel and repeat them ad infinitum...
Eventually we go full circle and start seeing what is the topic of the OP: that there are a lot of widely believed adages without them ever being well-supported by any evidence.
The same goes for natural selection. "Survival of the fittest" is always defined retrospectively. You'll never know what is truly advantageous at the moment. The only possible strategy is just to try anything.
Say someone defines success for themselves as "becoming the number 1 basketball player in the world", then gets into the top 10 and becomes rich and famous because of it. They might internally consider themselves a failure, even though they are very successful in the eyes of everyone else.
I understand what you're trying to say but as fyi... you're using "predict" in colloquial terms which is very different from math statistics where "predictor variable" is a term-of-art: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22statistics%22+%22predicto...
(a) term-of-art statistics example: the X independent variable represents low to high blood alcohol level which is a predictor for car crashes (represented by Y). A high blood alcohol of 0.20% is a better predictor of drivers causing car crashes than the amount of salt eaten in a meal.
(b) colloquial usage: Nothing "predicts" car crashes because my uncle Jim drank a whole bottle of vodka and didn't hit anybody when driving home -- while a Tesla self-driving car with no blood alcohol at all crashed into a tree! Predictions about car crashes are bogus.
Different usage of (a) and (b) is example of equivocation fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation
Another way to look at it: (a) is often about aggregates and groups (aka statistics) but (b) is about personal anecdotes or obersvations where n=1. This means they will disagree because they're talking about different things.
EDIT reply to : >Well, it's hardly "colloquial" usage, more like conversational, dictionary, typical, etc.
I don't what correction you're trying to make here. The top link for https://www.google.com/search?q=colloquial&oq=colloquial
... is : "(of language) used in ordinary or familiar _conversation_; not formal or literary."
That matches what you said.
>The comment didn't seem like it was grounded in maths/stats terminology.
Yes, and that was actually the main point of my comment. This thread's Nautilus article of "predict" refers to research studies which talks talks about statistical predictor variables ("grit" being the X axis independent variable). The gp comment copies the word "predict" in his own comment but uses it in a non-statistical meaning and readers may not be aware of the silent switch in usage. (Equivocation.)
E.g. Do SAT test scores "predict" income level? It can be "yes" or "no" depending on which meaning of "predict" one is using.
I read the comment as being about an individual rather than a population, which illustrates the problem: predicting individual success is (nearly?) impossible even if population data is consulted. Probably due to chaotic processes and the impossibility of understanding all relevant variables, exacerbated by the confusion of correlation with causation i.e. post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies.
It also depends on “step size”. So if you define success very incrementally you can about it almost scientifically and do “test and learn”.
On a large scale I agree with you, it’s pretty impossible to draw a clear line.