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fnord77

also:

- Don't have any chronic diseases or pain that will distract or dull your attention

- Have a stable source of income or enough wealth to let you try and fail at a lot of things

- Have stable family and friends

- Don't have optimism beaten out of you at a young age

etc

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I am amazed how many people take their fortunes for granted and then preach about how they "worked harder than anyone else hence deserve much more than the others". You have to be incredibly lucky to get to that point. In case of chronic illness (like brain fog) you are pretty much destined to fail.

I’m also amazed how people will take a self-improvement article like this, and take it so personally. Like yes, pg was lucky to have a lot of things work out for them, but that doesn’t mean his advice here (which encompasses more than just “work hard”) is invalid for everyone just because it’s invalid for some people.

It's a post-factum rationalization of personal experience possibly mixed with some anecdata.

Fine as a motivational material but that's all this is.

I get what you’re saying, and I agree that there’s a survival bias for all winners. But the pendulum swings too far if you believe you can’t learn anything at all from winners.

Can you say that, for all winners of any field, there’s no correlation between the winners and the losers that is not attributable to luck?

I think there are probably some persistent differences between the superachievers and the normals but I am very skeptical in the ability of the former to teach (and of the latter to learn from the former).

Oh, this is an interesting point that I think I agree with on some level.

Are you saying superachievers can’t teach others to be superachievers, or are you saying that superachievers can’t teach non achievers to be achievers

It would be nice to see Paul write more about the privileges he has enjoyed.

Yep, get yourself a bs job first while implicitly getting yourself stroke, cancer and diabetes from it to pay for utilities and a few gallons of water per month and only then do great work.

If 1000 people read this and only 100 of them meet your criteria, and it's good advice, than he would have helped 100 people.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here

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