The keys to wild success are getting in early and being lucky.

I'm entirely sure a lot of the early people at Amazon were in fact quite bright and hard working, and many good decisions were made, but plenty of other people knew selling stuff online was going to happen but couldn't get the stars to align on funding, or had a key member suffer a personal setback early on, etc.

I remember when in early 90's somebody was saying there will be a computer in each house. At the time I thought - good luck with that, computers are so expensive (I was in my early teens back then so my opinion was not particularly useful because I had no money and computers in my country were very expensive compared with average wage).

Then in late 90's somebody said internet will be in each house - again I could not believe :)

Later somebody said people will do shopping through internet - guess what my opinion was ;)

Later somebody said everyone will have a smartphone - at this point I thought my gut feeling is probably wrong - even if I was happy with my mobile I thought my spending habits are different than those of majority.

Later somebody said everyone will be connected to the internet 24/7 on their smartphones.

So I missed most of the wave purely because I had no imagination and no business acumen.. I can image value of people who do see those trends early.

Because he spent a lot of time and energy trying to get richer, while I spent a similar amount of time optimizing my life for "lazing around, drawing stuff, and not working very hard".

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of morally dubious things he was willing to do in the pursuit of being the richest motherfucker on the planet that I'm not willing to do, either.

I had a bunch of such 'obvious' ideas when I was an eager young computer whiz back in the late 80s/90s, including internet service via cable instead of dialup, online warehouse sales etc. I didn't get rich because I was young, had no capital, and no social network. I worked at banks and also for a somewhat innovative company that prefigured social networking (think GUIs for online forums during the dialup era). although I tried to get people interested in my ideas/cultivate mentor relationships/gain business skills, most efforts were shrugged off with a response like 'go to business school and come back in 5 years.'

I was smart enough to hire for technical work, from development to training and documentation, but lacked the social skills to negotiate or build so I spent a lot of my 20s doing Very Clever Things for which other people reaped all the economic and strategic rewards. So you can be very competent and have a lot of imagination, but if you're not in the right place at the right time or work in an environment with a lot of gatekeepers, you may not be able to capitalize successfully. You can also find that you're so good in a particular role that people who pay you for it have an incentive to not help you with career development.