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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Luck is the particular details. Not luck is the broad arc of one's career. For example, you're not going to meet a parter sitting in your basement. You meet one by going out and interacting with people. The particular partner you wind up with is luck, but finding someone compatible is not.

I.e. the trick is to enable luck to find you. At some point, it becomes inevitable.

For another example, stock investing. You can't make money in stocks if you don't invest in stocks. Individual stock performance is a bit of a crap shoot. But if you're a patient investor, pick good companies, follow a sensible investment plan, the math is inevitable that you're going to make money in it.

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I think a lot of people underestimate the persistence factor. A lot of getting lucky is about getting through the times when you are unlucky. If you can weather the storm, the sun comes out eventually.

People like stories of people who bet it all on black and win, though, so they think that's the model for success. Really, the way to win is just to not lose.

That's one way to put it. Another way is you're not going to get rich from stock options if you don't get a STEM job, and you won't get a STEM job without going to college and getting a STEM degree, and you're not going to college unless you stay in school and graduate.

Lots and lots of choices one made to get there.

Persistence is very important, but we also can't ignore the factors allowing for persistence. If two people fail with their startup and only one goes on to found a new one, the two-time founder is not necessarily more persistent. Maybe he has a social safety net and the other one doesn't, maybe he is only responsible for himself and the other one has a family, maybe he happens to get a loan which the other doesn't.

Treating each and every case as fully comparable based on just their outcome merely hurts those that have already been hurt.

Conversely, that safety net is often a product of preparation as much as a product of luck. Sure, kids of rich parents can come back to do startup after startup, but almost all of them fail at it precisely because they can run back to mommy and daddy for more.

For most successful people, the safety net comes in the form of saving money wisely, making the right friends who can give you some work to fill in the gap, or - like my multi-millionaire landscaper - being willing to be underemployed for a period of time while you get back on your feet. If you support a partner or a family, it can be a lot harder to keep yourself safe like this, but you might also have another income to fall back on.

I'm sorry to sound harsh, but I fully disagree. This is making the exact same mistake as the GP.

> the safety net comes in the form of saving money wisely

This FULLY ignores the many reasons that make it harder so save money exactly BECAUSE you don't have a safety net. A genius born into a bad environment with some medical preconditions might never be able to save ANY money due to needing to spend it to stay alive.

And that's not even looking at the many very expensive aspects of being poor like preventative care.

> making the right friends who can give you some work to fill in the gap

Right, except that poor neighbourhoods have fewer people able to employ you. So you're either lucky to meet the right people and have them like you (!) or you move out of your poor neighbourhood with the money you don't have.

> being willing to be underemployed for a period of time while you get back on your feet

Okay, and how will this help anyone pay their bills? Should people just say "guess it sucks I can't feed my family, but they just gotta power through, soon it will be worth it"?

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Please don't read this as me saying that things like safety nets are 100% absolutely luck-based. But it's incredible to me just how much people are willing to look at "what they can do for themselves" without being willing to see why the same could be harder for people in different situations.

A friend of mine once described this as a "critical hit chance" (ala video games). There's not much chance of a 'critical hit' if you're just hanging around home, for example. But if you're on the road, stopping in at a random pub for dinner? There's that chance something special happens.

Sometimes it might be better to trade the option with higher average damage for one that is more volatile, because you might get lucky at just the right moment.

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