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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

It’s a necessary but not sufficient condition. Not everyone who works as hard as the Beatles achieves what they did.

It's a small club. Yes, luck is always involved, and you are not in control. Luck hits you. When the lightning strikes, you're either ready or you are not. The problem is that most people seem to behave in an exact opposite manner. They waste their life, waiting for luck to swoop them off of their feet. This is definitely wrong. You prepare yourself for when these opportunities decide to reveal themselves.

It's like saying "I'm not going to begin to exercise and attract a partner until I meet them first" - a recipe for failure. You must become the attractive person, and then, when they happen to enter your life, you attract them.

I apologize. I'm riffing.

Please don’t apologise - very well put and I agree completely.

The fact that the work is necessary is what most people overlook. I just worry a little that if we expect too much then that itself can be a barrier to sustainably putting the effort in.

It’s OK to work hard and achieve a modest amount. We should take pleasure in what we do achieve.

>"Not everyone who works as hard as the Beatles achieves what they did."

Definitely true that they had a remarkable result, but I don't know of anyone who actually works/worked that hard and 'failed' (by any reasonable definition). Most people tend to dramatically overstate their persistence and work ethic.

> I don't know of anyone who actually works/worked that hard and 'failed'

Are you seriously handwaving away survivorship bias?

I am speaking of people I know personally, as well as anecdotes I’ve heard.

to be fair, if they really failed you wouldn't know of them

Around 20 years ago I fell in with a bunch of screenwriter wannabes. Roughly 100 people, plus or minus, including myself. A difficult, highly competitive creative field.

Every person in that group who worked hard at it has had success at some level. That varies from making distributed indie films to running a network television show, but some level of success.

None of the successful people half-assed it, none of the hard workers utterly failed, none of the half-assed people made it.

The degree of success is largely out of your control. Innate ability, luck, etc are all factors. But the time and effort expended are in your control, and they're the primary factor of being able to make a run of it.

So what you're saying is that the combinations are like:

           Work  Don't
           hard  try
          .-----.-----.
    Get   | :-) | :-( |
    lucky |     |     |
          |-----+-----|
    No    | :-( | :-( |
    luck  |     |     |
          '-----'-----'

You don't have any control over what row you end up in. But if you want any chance of success, you better at least make sure you're in the left column.

The analogy I like is that you have a net and you need to catch luck in that net to succeed. Naturally, you want the area of your net to be as large as possible to have the most chance of catching luck. There are a lot of things that can increase the size your net. One of them being working hard.

Yes but my underlying point was that if you don’t expect Beatles level success then you might turn the Work Hard / No Luck combination to :-) - just enjoy what do you do achieve through your hard work.

And that's the whole gist of the problem of existence.

You have to merge this table with a S-curve of growth so you can work 'a bit' hard in a lucky enough context. And repeat the cycle.

I'm the kind to grind hard for long but blind.. it leads to a boring death. Find where, when, how to spend your mental energy is crucial.

And the other part that comes with that is that no one that achieves what the Beatles did doesn't work as hard as they did. As you said, necessary but not sufficient. Hard work exposes you to opportunities, some people have better opportunities than others.

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