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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

> It was similar with Lionel Messi. He had great natural ability, but when his youth coaches talk about him, what they remember is not his talent but his dedication and his desire to win.

I can assure you, there are many kids that practice harder than Messi did when he was young. He is not a great player because of hard work, he is a great player because of luck. I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money. It's just plain silly to attribute Messi's greatness to anything other than luck - both his physical abilities and the environment that taught him how to fine tune his abilities.

Hard work is useless without that special precise knowledge of which work you should be doing. Few young soccer players know how to practice in a way to become Messi, even if they have the right body to do it. It's useless without being in the right environment too.

> Now, when I'm not working hard, alarm bells go off. I can't be sure I'm getting anywhere when I'm working hard, but I can be sure I'm getting nowhere when I'm not, and it feels awful.

That, my friends, is what a VC would love for you to believe. There's nothing sincere when someone in his position writes something like this. Because hey, if you're the 0.1% of the time that it works out, he gets rich. And if you're the 99.9% that wastes their time (like all the kids that never play soccer at the highest levels) he loses nothing.

I used to enjoy PG's writings. He's crossed a line where he believes that the only thing good in the world is what is best for VCs.

View on HN

In fact there is a good video from Verassium [1]. One can't discount luck. There is no such thing as hard work. It's just the feeling of being in flow and whatever one does to make you re-live that flow, it's totally worth it.

Instead of working on hard problems, it's best to prioritize on optimum problem and get the best out of your situation. With optimum problem, I mean the problems that allow you to maximize your living, instead of believing on moonshot dream.

It's okay to dream, but putting expectations on dream is losing touch with reality. Sure in an ideal world, essays like this would be perfect motivation, but you are living in a world ruled by billionaires and plutocrats. So, as long as you get enough share of the pie, I don't think one should pursue the moonshot dream.

Rather invest this time on working on job (whole-hardheartedly) only during office hours, and actually try living a life outside of it. You don't have to be a superstar to live a life because humans have already lived for so long.

Stop believing these bullshit VC ideas. The real essence of this essay is understanding the flow and noticing the events that triggers flow. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I&t=12s

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354. Flow

I’ve been feeling great dread lately with the direction our industry is going (has always been going tbh). This conversation gives me some sort of renewed hope though. Hundreds of people admitted hard work burned them out; seeing VCs ask to sacrifice your life for their bottom line. Realizing the role luck plays in success.

Maybe covid pushed a significant number of people past their breaking point and now their eyes are wide open. I cannot say, but I’m glad to see so many people are speaking the truth.

Check out Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, it's a great little book that goes over just how much chance goes into one's success (and how oblivious most humans are to detecting this chance).

*Veritasium. His tag line is "An element of truth", since "veritas" is Latin for truth and most element names end in "ium". I recommend the whole channel!

Veristablium?

There was a long article linked on HN a while back, about how you can't start a company or invent something unless it's the right time, you can't rush innovation just because you try hard. It was gwern-style detailed and full of references and citations, not just a top of the head opinion piece.

Anyone have a clue what it was or where?

Perhaps you're thinking of gwern? https://www.gwern.net/Timing

That video from Verassium is spot on.

PG says:

> There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort. You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three: you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard.

I think that's the fundamental secret to success at anything. If you want to compete at the top level you have to have all three. It's not sufficient to just work hard, or just have natural ability. You need to fully apply yourself aligned with your natural talents.

Hard work is a necessary but not sufficient requirement.

Without luck, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without knowledge, you will not get to the level of Messi. Without living in the right environment, you will not get to the level of Messi.

The "natural ability" thing is just a spin on the same idea. Work hard to recognize your natural ability. Be realistic about it. In that view, natural ability is not a matter of luck. It is still a story about doing the right things so that you deserve all the credit if you are successful, and more importantly, so that you can blame those that didn't.

> Without luck, you will not get to the level of Messi.

I would add that as a fourth requirement to compete at the very top level along with the other three. A degree of luck is also necessary.

> Without living in the right environment, you will not get to the level of Messi.

A fifth requirement.

None of that means hard work is NOT a requirement too - and one of the most important.

Without hard work Messi gets nowhere. But if he has the other things going for him, eventually he will get lucky by just being persistent.

The issue is that you can't know if you meet the other requirements, so it's easy to think "I'll get lucky by just being persistent" and you never go anywhere.

That is true. If you want more certainty, get a job.

But if you want to shoot for the stars, you might end up in a situation where your hard work doesn't pay out.

Without hard work, even lucky Messi would be a nobody.

The ability to do hard work is a worthy personal goal. Not for the sake of a job per say, but for the sake of one's own well-being. You seem to be seeing this exclusively through the lens of predatory capitalism, which might blind you to any valuable insights here.

Fundamental secret? I thought this is obvious. Imagine the following simple model. People have 3 normally distributed attributes: luck, talent and laziness, their sum determines succcess. If you generate 1 million people and sort them by success, the top 1000 will be good at all of the 3 attributes

It is obvious, but a huge number of people don't get it still.

Okay, but nobody is going to become anywhere close to Messi without working hard. That's the point. Do you think someone could become Messi by putting in barely any practice or effort? You might get into a team, but you won't be a Messi lol. Be honest with yourself.

Obviously luck plays a role, but most people (>90% I'll bet) who are successful in the end get there due to hard work.

I could sit on my butt and do nothing all day, and suddenly my doge coin are worth a million bucks. I basically don't know anyone IRL who got mega rich off these things. I know a lot more people IRL who are mega rich because they work hard to this day.

The parent's comment wan't implying that luck was everything, but to point out that luck is also an important factor.

> There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.

And luck, Paul. Don't forget luck.

Hard work is only sustainable when you occasionally get that carrot at the end of the stick, before moving onto the next bit of hard work.

And money

If you have money, then even if you do mediocre work (e.g. in music), you can ironically appear as doing great work.

I think luck falls into the natural ability category.

I would suggest the opposite: natural ability falls in the luck category.

I think it falls into a different category. Lucky in this regard is being in the right situations at the right time.

It’s important to recognize physical activity is very different from mental, creative or social activities. If you can convince people of things, you can be wildly successful. They may listen to you because you speak well, they may listen to you because you’re telling them what they want to hear or they may listen to you because you’re rich. None of which require the rigorous practice of a professional athlete.

Same goes for creative endeavors. I can be much more creative (and successful) if I’m well rested vs. grinding.

Contrary to you, the most successful people I know didn’t work hard at all. They either inherited cash and a network or they invented something that got huge and they sold it.

> the most successful people I know didn’t work hard at all. They either inherited cash...

That's not success.

I think the vast majority of CEOs and VCs come from the upper class. At least 99% of the execs I know did.

Put it this way: if you’re lucky and work hard, you could be like Messi. If you’re very very lucky and don’t work hard, you may still be like Messi. If you’re unlucky and work hard, you won’t ever be like Messi.

Just ask Babe Ruth, he didn’t work hard like Messi. He was very very lucky to be born with phenomenal talent.

Luck is the critical factor, hard work is secondary, though beneficial in that it decreases (but can never eliminate) the required amount of luck.

Sure, hard work is often a requisite (unless you luck out in the extreme). But for the most part, it’s not enough, it’s not a guarantee, and it’s not the hardest worker who necessarily becomes the most successful. The point is that you shouldn’t look at the rich and the famous and think ”wow, the reason they’re there and the rest of us aren’t is because they’re so much more virtous and hardworking”.

Obviously it’s all a matter of degree, I’m assuming we’re talking really well off here. A lot of people are in the position where hard work is likely to yield moderate success and a decent life at least.

Correlation vs causation.

Just because they "worked hard to this day", doesn't mean that's what caused them to be mega rich.

People just don't like to think that maybe they didn't do anything special to deserve their success.

Messi was one of those kids like Tiger Woods and Steph Curry who had a dedicated parent coach who got them into the game at an extremely young age, and into the hands of the best trainers they could throughout their childhood. Most kids who are born into that situation end up at the tops of their sports.

Putting aside the fact that the article explicitly agrees with you that just hard work isn't enough, here's the part of your comment I don't understand:

> I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money.

Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?

Of course hard work matters, but when VC tells you to work hard, take it with the grain of salt, because this is how VC is going to make money off your work. What is missing from this advice is what is sacrificed. If and when 10-20 year later you cash out, what else are you going to have beside money? Family, friends, health? If you can make this trade-off consciously - good for you, but most people just go with the flow and don't think about it until it's too late.

Double irony of this advice is that many VCs are one of the most laid-back people you can meet. Usually they are already rich, so they don't exactly have to hussle anymore, and can choose when to do so.

You are waisting your breath trying to convince the fanboys here. Their brain cannot grasp the concept that the VC just wants to make money.

To the VC, investing in a startup is equivalent to buying a very out of the money call option. Option theory tells us these are ultra low premium but have immensive upside, so the payoff for the VC is ultra convex and non linear: from 1000 startups, 10 get more than 10 mil valuation, and maybe 1 is a unicorn (i’m making the numbers up but u get the idea). So yes Mr Graham would love for all of the fanboys to work hard since they are literally just options to him, and he has nothing to lose apart from small options.

On the flip side, startup owners are then underwriting options in the form of their life and work, so must be short volatility.

Long story short: dont do startups thinking you will win, think the VC will win

> the article explicitly agrees with you that just hard work isn't enough

It does not in any way agree with me. I am saying luck is important. If that's anywhere in there, I missed it.

> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?

Hard work is not the distinguishing characteristic. Luck is. Why promote hard work? Because someone else is working hard for your benefit.

I think part of what you're calling luck is what pg calls natural ability and part of it is the idea of "luck favors the prepared". I don't see how you can attribute luck to Lionel Messi's success, with his natural ability+hard work there's no way he wouldn't have been discovered and achieved success.

Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. I agree that the essay glosses over the element of luck that is involved, but I don't think that makes the rest of what Paul is saying wrong. Even if hard work alone doesn't always lead to success, not working hard guarantees that you won't be exceptional.

Hard work is not even really necessary. You can inherit wealth, get a good position somewhere through connections/nepotism, ...

To be clear, I think most successful people are hard working. But hard work is not a necessary condition for success.

So just to be clear, you're saying that in order to be successful, you have to be lucky, primarily?

I’d agree with that. Luck is absolutely a requirement and it is definitely more important than any other factor.

What about intelligence and being able to notice emerging trends? Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s? Or did they see what was going on at Xerox PARC and the coming PC revolution? Their less lucky colleagues stayed in college and went on to have normal careers.

Those are important, but nearly as much as luck. Without the luck he had in terms of timing and location it is absolutely not clear that Gates (or Jobs) would have been as successful.

This is a simple empirical observation: there are many individuals who are both more intelligent than and harder working (in the sense of this article) than Gates or Jobs and who never come to within a tenth of their success. That’s 100% luck in action.

Could Gates have been a success without intellect and hard work? Probably not. Could a number of others who were more intelligent or harder working have succeeded if they instead were in Gates’ position? Almost certainly.

Technology is littered with failed experiments, not always for hard work or technical reasons. Remember Xanadu? How about Transmeta? For each Jobs or Gates, there's probably 20 of them out there who ended up having more normal careers simply due to luck.

> Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s?

This seems like luck to me[1]:

> [Mary Maxwell Gates'] tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates#Career

That is also luck.

Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.

Noticing "emerging trends" is also likely to not have been 100% due to Jobs/Gates attentiveness. If you heard about it from a friend of a friend, that's extremely lucky.

This is all also in hindsight. Of course it looks like they knew exactly what they were doing, because they succeeded. Other people were not so lucky.

> Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.

So is all of evolution, but then you still have adaptation. There is a skill to noticing opportunities and having the fortitude to take the risk. Not everyone does that.

> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?

Hard work doesn’t matter (at least to the extent pg posits) and they promote it because (surprise!) they’re not all knowing entities but humans with flaws (yes even successful people can hold views that are not correct).

Hard work matters exactly as much as the dozen other factors but when you are busy working hard you don't think about those. It goes both ways. If those factors are in your favor you don't talk about them, when they are not, you pretend that they don't matter because hard work is above everything else.

>Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?

Telling someone else to work harder costs nothing. They're not the one putting in 16 hour days.

> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?

Hard work matters. But it isn't enough. Luck is needed to transform hard work into wealth. Line cooks work very hard.

Incidentally, YC's business model positions it extremely well vs. other VCs to take advantage of this calculus. Fund 1000s of startups full of maniacally hard working kids, and you can expect a few to also get lucky just by sheer volume. Whereas if you're only funding a few startups they may work equally as hard and never run into the luck required to succeed.

Your comment about VCs makes no sense. If a VC wants you to work hard because that’s how a VC gets rich, that means that working hard leads to building a successful company. If it were purely luck, why would the VC care if you worked hard or not?

If VCs knew what made companies great, they wouldn’t fail 9 out of 10 times. More than any profession I can think of, VC is almost pure luck + how much wealth you already have, which attracts deal flow, which increases your odds to get lucky. PG blogs because he thinks it increases his deal flow (or he wants attention). Just because he’s saying it, it doesn’t make it true, even if he believes his own story.

That still doesn't answer my question. If hard work had no effect, why would VCs encourage it?

Because they’re ignorant and think it matters.

So they encourage hard work because it makes them money, but not really, because they are only ignorant in thinking that it does, and it's actually entirely luck?

Yeah, this attitude is a mental pretzel more akin to ideology than fact.

> this attitude is a mental pretzel more akin to ideology than fact.

Of course that's the case, because you are baking your own misleading slant into questions and then wondering why the output of the questioning process is not satisfactory

Slant such as:

>"...If hard work had no effect..."

Which is not something that's being argued for. It is just a strawman of your own making to the points raised

Id recommend you to do introspection on manicheist type thinking, and the difference between aggregate results of "Luck+Hard Work" vs the "Luck"/"Hard Work" work binary thinking.

I can't solve your errors of thinking, you'll have to work hard to understand the problem, or maybe you'll be one of the lucky few to understand it with ease :)

The condescending, passive aggressive reply, filled with “you must look within” tropes and topped off with a smiley face. Is there anything more irritating?

Just dont add the slant to the questions next time, it is just ...... not even unnecessary, it is counterproductive for you and everyone, to the other person is just as irritating as what I did to you with the previous reply + smiley

Or alternatively go watch that veritasium video that's being shared over the thread, it is very good

They make money through luck. They speak authoritatively out of ignorance. Monkeys rolling dice could do an equally good job, that doesn’t mean you should take advice from a monkey with a gambling problem.

Why delete the reply? It is an accurate angle, albeit inflamatory, after all that was the outcome of the Buffet bet vs HedgeFunds regarding the ROI of index funds

But yeah, not sure if id say that they make money through luck "alone", more like they make money through "the aggregate of luck" and very deep pockets which themselves are financed through suprasecular low interest rates, or in the same manner that a Casino will always win in the aggregate

I didn’t delete my reply, but I totally agree with you.

I think the criticism is not so illogical. Let's just assume your company has a 5% chance of wild success and you can double it by working insanely hard (I think these numbers are likely generous, but easier to take round numbers for the sake of argument). It is in this case simultaneously true that it's in VCs' interest to convince you to work very hard and also that it's probably not in your interest. It only makes sense for them to promote because the one or two lucky groups will make up for all the duds.

Then hard work increases your chances. What is controversial about this?

I don't think the point is "hard work has no effect on outcome", but rather "for nearly all people who end up successful, luck played a very significant role which is often minimized", and as a corollary "hard work is not a sufficient condition for success, but successful people tend to portray it as such".

For a good summary of this argument, I recommend the (fairly short) Veritasium video that has been posted several times already in this discussion: https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I

"hard work is not a sufficient condition for success, but successful people tend to portray it as such".

I don't agree with that at all. Most successful people say that some degree of luck was involved.

Perhaps this point is a bit too anecdotal, but I've certainly encountered the "just work hard and you'll make it" attitude a lot. And its inverse, people assuming that unsuccessful people must be unsuccessful because of their personal flaws.

In any case, that's the corollary, not the main point. Which is:

> I don't think the point is "hard work has no effect on outcome", but rather "for nearly all people who end up successful, luck played a very significant role which is often minimized"

You ever read jwz’s “Watch a VC Use My Name to Sell a Con”?

> I did make a bunch of money by winning the Netscape Startup Lottery, it's true. So did most of the early engineers. But the people who made 100x as much as the engineers did? I can tell you for a fact that none of them slept under their desk. If you look at a list of financially successful people from the software industry, I'll bet you get a very different view of what kind of sleep habits and office hours are successful than the one presented here.

> So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on.

The controversy is that while it technically increases your chances, increasing infinitesimal chances to slightly less infinitesimal chances isn’t necessarily worth your health. But if you have a stake in tons of companies hey, one of them will probably pay off if everyone is sacrificing everything for them.

I still don't understand what is so difficult about this. If you work hard, you're more likely to succeed. Not guaranteed to succeed. Luck still matters, although a lot less than people think.

Whether or not VCs are justified in earning their returns is a completely different issue. This has nothing to do with hard work and everything to do with investment and dilution.

The "controversy" is this online meme that everything is just "random" and "luck" and no one, anywhere, can ever do anything to be successful. The entire world is nothing but a Vegas casino.

It's just rationalization for laziness and frankly, it's completely uninteresting. No one who has actual business experience thinks this.

> "It's just rationalization for laziness"

Expand on this and taboo the word 'lazy' or the insult it comes with? "It's a rationalization for understanding that you aren't going to be Jeff Bezos. Unpicking the cultural idea that the more you suffer, the more you gain, and stop ruining your physical and mental health and social connections in a frantic all-out hard work obsession. Rebalance, and learn to be happier with the very ordinary non-millionaire life you will almost certainly get regardless of how hard you work".

> "The "controversy" is this online meme that everything is just "random" and "luck" and no one, anywhere, can ever do anything to be successful."

That is not the point of the meme. The point of the meme is to counter the "you Amazon warehouse worker, fast food worker, retail worker, call center worker, teacher, shouldn't expect a living wage or a pay rise or a better minimum wage, or a home, or medical cover, etc. because you are lazy. We know that because if you were working hard you'd be rich. Since you aren't rich, you must not be working hard. QED." norm.

Jeff Bezos packed boxes by hand using a door as a makeshift table at the start of Amazon! Well, a hundred million factory and warehouse and commercial kitchen and food processing plant workers are looking at that story with annoyance. It's not because they think Bezos didn't work hard. It's that they work equally hard at the same kind of work, for a lot longer, and nothing like the same return. And buried somewhere in the side comments "Jeff Bezos' parents invested $250,000" in mid-90s dollars. Yeah, sure, it was the hard work packing boxes on cheap homemade tables, that's the spin y'all put on the source of his success? It's not luck that he chose to start a company instead of working in a factory, but if a truck driver from Iowa tried to start an online bookstore in 1994 with no computer science background from Princeton, no wealthy parents, no background in a Wall Street firm known for "developing mathematical models to exploit anomalies in the market", no access to a home with a garage to work from, how much value is this "if you don't make it, it proves you're lazy" rhetoric adding to the world?

The meme is unpicking the logical fallacies "if hard work -> success, hard work is inherently virtuous, then success implies moral virtue (regardless of cause of success), and absense of massive success implies moral failure and laziness".

"Lazy" is a cheap dismissive non-explanation insult.

Nothing of what you wrote here relates to this link by PG or to what I wrote. Thinking that hard work is good and should be encouraged does not mean you think working class people shouldn’t have healthcare or that class mobility shouldn’t be easy.

This is really the fundamental issue I alluded to. Long political screeds filled with emotional appeals that have little to nothing to do with the topic.

Do you think "you could be Bill Gates, Lionel Messi or PG Wodehouse or Patrick Collison", "you could do great things!", counts as an emotional appeal? That's the carrot PG is dangling in the essay, and it feels more emotional than logical.

>That is not the point of the meme. The point of the meme is to counter the "you Amazon warehouse worker, fast food worker, retail worker, call center worker, teacher, shouldn't expect a living wage or a pay rise or a better minimum wage, or a home, or medical cover, etc. because you are lazy. We know that because if you were working hard you'd be rich. Since you aren't rich, you must not be working hard. QED.

I think the fundamental confusion is that this meme itself is an misrepresentation and strawman used in the ideological battle between right and left politics in the US. Nobody is claiming that blue collar workers are categorically lazy, especially not populist right politicians courting their votes.

Reasonable people across the political spectrum can agree that financial success is combination of hard work + aptitude + luck. They are likely to differ on the relative impact of each factor, and the degree to which the government should act as a equalizer to correct for aptitude and luck. It is a major problem that both sides choose to fight this issue in the context of extreme outliers and apply the conclusions to everyday situations.

Personally, I think the meme of emphasizing luck to the exclusion of hard work is destructive. When the belief is taken to the extreme and hard work doesn't improve outcomes, the path to improving your situation changes from being more productive and improving yourself. Why bother learning a new trade, relocating for a better job, building something, or taking risks if there is no payoff.

It is as though you are not reading what I'm saying. Let's try analogy. If you work really hard at it you're more likely to become an NFL quarterback. Does that mean it's a good idea to neglect everything else to chase that dream or that Roger Goodell would suggest that to you out of careful consideration of your welfare?

Because most VC founded companies are not about results. They are about virtue signaling to attract even more capital. Profitability has been thrown out of the window long time ago. Success is measured in the stupidest KPIs you can imagine. That's why 9 out of 10 VC founded companies fail. So you need to indoctrinate your minions to make them act accordingly.

You are arguing a completely different point than PG.

PG is talking about the ingredients for "doing great things" and "great work".

You are talking about getting rich. Sometimes these are aligned, and sometimes they aren't.

It seems like you are looking for a predictive model of who succeeds in society and who doesn't, while PG is offering life advice on the value of hard work (something within an individual's control) - a different topic.

Well to be the best in a very large group of people, you need to max out all of the main factors: luck, talent, hard work. That's just statistics.

I agree with you though. I find it annoying when people play down the role of luck in their success, it's kind of narcissistic. Unconsciously, they like the feeling that they are better than others, and by achieving success, they prove it to themselves. Giving luck too much credit would break this line of reasoning.

Also, one very important but overlooked factor of hard work is that it's highly correlated to the expected reward. It's much easier to work hard at a quickly-growing startup that you co-own, compared to working hard at a regular job that you don't find meaningful. The hard-workers in the former example then think they "deserve" the success because they've been working harder than others, when in fact, they were just lucky.

He is talking about doing great work, not about becoming rich or successful. You do need luck for your great work to take you places, but your own agency counts for much of your ability to do great work. Plenty of great work will not reap great rewards; it is done because someone feels that it has to be done.

If you want to be the best, you will have to work very hard.

Claiming that anyone who is at the top of their game isn't working hard, is just plain lying.

This doesn't mean that only working hard will get you there. But it does mean that not working hard will not get you there.

howdy. as someone who has followed his career trajectory for the last 15 yars, I can assure You that "Luck" or serendipity or however You want to normalize his abilities has nothing to do with his abilities. Its Sheer Hard-work and Will to win. Being lucky is scoring 50 goals one season and 10 the second. This guys averages 50+ every season. So You might want to read up on it before You hypothesize. Like Spock famously said, "there is no such thing called miracles".

GP isn't saying that he is lucky each game, he's saying he was lucky to be born with the body he has and he was lucky to get the coaching opportunities that came with that.

But it's not exactly true. His body statistically is not the best for football. In fact he had a growth problem he had to take hormonal treatment for. Initial coaching opportunities are thanks to the parents, but then he had to work hard to qualify for Barcelona youth program. Then he had to move to Spain as young teenager to be able to continue training at the required level. Amount of hard work and sacrifice he invested is way beyond that most other footballers do, and incomparable to normal population at all.

Shorter people have a lower center of gravity which is an advantage for players maneuvering the ball through the midfield. There is certainly a trade off with strength and vision but Messi's body type is hardly unusual in top flight football. Xavi and Iniesta, who played with Messi on Barcelona, were superstars and all three are 5'7".

Messi is 169, average height at the World Cup is 182.4, this is quiet a difference. In fact he is in the lowest percentiles. Ronaldo is 187, Neymar is 175.

why do you care about the average height? - in some positions being taller is better and others being shorter - being an average doesn't mean that it's in any way better.

My point is that Messi is hardly some kind of physical outlier among top midfielders.

So he was lucky to go through a system that had him competing against higher level talent while at a physical disadvantage. By far the best way to train at a young age. His statistically good body for football counterparts meanwhile competed at amongst themselves and with lower talent. He was lucky enough to be good enough to push past the barrier of being able to be in a situation of advantageous training. It is a very rare position that often leads to exceptional players.

He also was lucky enough to be born. If you take to absurd, you can attribute anything to luck. A lot of kids where in position like him, and none made it to number one.

In what way did PG work hard? His job seems incredibly cushy to me. He even had the leisure to write his own lisp! VCs don’t work hard. They sit there and watch people grovel.

Is this a joke I'm not getting? Do you think he hopped off his skateboard at 19 and became a VC?

That’s a great way to describe it. He sold Viaweb in the dot com bubble to a hyper ignorant Yahoo!

Literally a stoke of luck and being in the right place at the right time.

PG was lucky yes but also prepared to build web apps which nobody was doing at the time. He also had great co-founders/friends. Also the idea that a website could edit itself instead of having to be uploaded etc... And then they did it. So part of it was being there, part of it was building a technology/product that Yahoo needed etc... Part of it is working in computers as the web took off. Nobody at the time really knew what the web was going to be and I think we don't really know the full impact of the internet will be even today.

Take my story as an example. I worked in high school as a web form developer in 1995 and 1996. Lots of demand from professors to build their course websites with forms. I was just happy to have a summer job inside with AC. I had the technical chops to build an MVP of wufoo or surveymonkey etc.. But I didn't because I thought it was trivial and underestimated it. I thought at most I would sign up a few dozen psychology grad students or something. It wouldn't be a proper business etc...

Likewise, sometime in 2005-2007 I was in SF and couldn't get a cab and thought about a mobile app but discounted it as infeasible b/c I thought cities would never legalize it to preserve their taxi medallion scheme etc... That's probably true, they would have liked to do that but the public basically demanded it and Uber moved very fast. I reasoned incorrectly and underestimated the market.

I also underestimated DropBox, AirBnB, Hotmail, even Google, Yahoo and FB. The list goes on and on. Hind sight is 20:20 but I think it is important to figure out why I discounted these ideas at the time and what biases I had etc...

I think though that if you are actually interested in something though that goes a long ways to keeping you engaged. You can see past the discounting and the haters. If you continue to work on that, then by the time the rest of the world catches up, you are way ahead.

You don't even have to be some kind of Jedi who can see the future, if you just work on it because it is interesting. As you do that you will get glimpses as to what the future might look like.

Today, I actually don't think Dropbox is "just a sync or backup feature". It is so much more than that and that market has a lot of potential. GDrive, iCloud, and Microsoft all have big problems and limit themselves which hurts consumers.

>He's crossed a line where he believes that the only thing good in the world is what is best for VCs.

I don't think he thinks that at all. Check out his article on VCs http://www.paulgraham.com/venturecapital.html

You have to put yourself in a position to get lucky. Doesn’t mean that you will.

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