You seem to be conflating the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions. Working hard may be a necessary condition for success, but I don't think anyone has ever claimed it was a sufficient one.
I'm talking about the idea that you have to work so hard that it threatens or consumes everything else in your life. And no one claims that doing that is sufficient, but a lot of people claim it's necessary.
It probably is necessary if the plan is to hit a billion-dollar exit in a few years. I just think that path entails a lot of extra risk that investors overwhelmingly benefit from, and founders end up paying for in the event that things go south. And sadly, I feel that a lot of investors essentially exploit young founders who don't know enough yet to know that they're paying a very high price for a 1/10000 chance at a grand slam (making $20m in 2-5 years), when they'd be better off in almost every way by going for the 1/10 or 1/100 base hit (making $2m in 5-10 years).
And to be clear, I'm not lumping YC in with most investors here. However, YC does place a little too much emphasis on raising VC and not enough on building revenues. But that's a bubble for you :)
This is easier to understand if you consider e.g. the question of being over 7 feet tall. Maybe only 1 in 10000 (or whatever) people is over 7 feet tall. But that doesn't mean your probability of being over 7 feet tall is .01%. Your probability is either 0% or 100%.
So yes, I suppose some founders have a very high probability and some have almost no probability. But that's not useful when you don't know which group you're in yet. So the average actually IS useful.
You have either 0% or 100% probability of being over 7 feet tall, but what about your unborn child? Genetics aside, if 1 out of 10000 kids are born over 7 ft and you have a gun to your head, how will you calculate your kids odds of being that tall?
For example, YC's whole investment model is based on the assumption that it's not just hindsight, and that the YC partners can use the data model that they have, that gets better with each batch, to predict which founders fall into the "success bin", and they choose to invest in those.
By your logic, this implies that in the best possible circumstances (YC), you're not going to get above a few percent chance a priori of a huge success if you work like crazy.
Whereas an equally intelligent person working reasonable hours on the side when appropriate has a decent chance of making a profitable lifestyle business in the millions without the possibility burnout and debt.
$10 million, minus the VC investment, split each among 2 or 3 founders. That ends up being what, $2-3 million in 4 years? I personally know several people who make more than that off of one iPhone app on the side. Apple's paid out billions to app developers.
Again, look at the numbers: what percent of YC investments have exited at $10 million+ in 4 years? Again, much closer to 10% than 100%. This is in a thread where pg implies that the chances of a big success are 2/3 or higher for some people. Empirical evidence proves that top investors are not right anywhere near the probability suggested.
No VC whose name you recognize will invest in bad startups to get the management fees.
Even if you're one of those people, you can do way better than falling back an average. You can for example ask experienced investors. It's part of their job to judge the probability that you'll succeed.
"In a down market," for example, "the index's direction doesn't matter if you have the right stock which is going up".
The anthropic principle is that even though the number of planets hospitable to life is tiny the probability that humanity evolved on a planet that is hospitable to human life is 100%. The examples you gave are symmetrical.