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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

Watch this video:

Talent and hard work is not responsible for successful moonshots. They are often the prerequisites. But the ultimate disproportional success is achieved through sheer luck.

You might get lucky yourself or you might not. But it shouldn't make you feel any worse about yourself than hearing that your friend won the lottery, if you buy a ticket every now and then yourself.

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It's a great video, but I really think there are four factors for entrepreneurial success. Hard work, good judgement, luck and appetite for risk. You really have to have all four, even just 3 in large measure is almost a guarantee of failure in startup land.

* With lack of hard work you just won't beat out harder working rivals.

* With poor judgement all that hard work will be going in the wrong direction.

* Without luck your timing or connections with the right collaborators might never work out.

* Without an appetite for risk you'll stick to the tried and true path and never truly innovate or take advantage of rare opportunities.

Skill and luck is a better distinction. Skill are all the things you have influence over and luck is all the things that you have no influence over. And for marvelous success you need both. And among people who achived such success most would have not achieved it if luck played no part in the process.

I suppose you can lump hard work, judgement and risk appetite under skill, but they really are very much different things. In particular I don't think risk appetite is something most people would consider part of skill. If anything I think most people would expect skilful people to take fewer risks and stick to things they know for sure.

I definitely recognise risk appetite as a skill because it's something I know I lack. On the other hand, taking big risks - and having the kind of personality that takes them - seems likely give rise to 10 badly spent lives for each good one. Can't farm black swans when your n is 1 or something.

Let's say maybe calibrated risk appetite. Too high of a risk appetite has its own problems especially long-term.

With persistence comes luck. Not particularly a fan of balajis but I like the way he once put it: "Hardwork is flipping a coin a hundred times. Luck is having it come up heads".

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