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Sorry, I have to counter you. Because someone close to me has always been about countering survivorship bias. And they have absolutely ruined their life. It's an easy out that people who are sharing their successes with you and the world have a survivorship bias. This is a fairly recent idea and quite a poison in itself.

What it actually preaches is don't look and emulate the successful people in your environment and society as this is all based on luck. Can't disagree more

It's not all luck at all, but luck is critical.

Skill and hard work are what buy you the lottery ticket. Luck is what determines if the ticket pays or not. That's why almost all successful people have a string of failures behind them, and why the truism "you've only really failed when you stop trying" exists.

However, you can have skill and put in hard work and still never have the success you're seeking. It happens all the time.

Although much of this depends on how you define "success". I'm assuming here that it means monetary gain, but most people don't have "get rich" as their measure of success. In reality, success is being able to live a life that provides satisfaction and happiness. That's an easier thing to achieve.

I think the luck factor is over-interpreted in this comment.

The reason most successful people have a string of failures behind them is because they learn from past experience and build networks and profile over the course of their career.

Luck applies most at the starting line - your location, your family and their wealth/status/connections [1], the traits and health you inherit, your education and the people you know who can mentor you, invest in you and work with you.

Over time the role of luck recedes and the role of experience becomes more significant (which is why, a few 20-something tech billionaires notwithstanding, most high-growth companies are founded when the founder is in their mid 40s [2]).

Also, “skill and hard work” are not the most important factors; in my experience the most important factor is the ability to self-improve, which takes humility and patience.

[1] It’s certainly not a given that being born into vast wealth equals luck in this context: plenty of heirs to vast fortunes turn out to be deadbeats. They may still be able to become successful in their own career but in a fairly pathetic, unearned kind of way. The right kind of luck for entrepreneurial success is a moderate degree of privilege (just enough not to spoil you) with a moderate degree of hardship (just enough not to break you). This certainly applied to Steve Jobs. Bill Gates too if you include the bullying at school.

[2] https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

There are ways that your comment and the parent are both right.

I’m very much on board with the idea of eschewing victimhood thinking, and I generally see the invocation of survivorship bias as a pretty sad indicator of someone’s attachment to victimhood.

However I also recognize that the world isn’t great at empowering people to get out of difficult situations in life. Once you’re down, the world has all kinds of ways of keeping you down. “Just work hard and save money” seems like simple stuff that anyone can do but it doesn’t get you very far if you’re at the bottom of the heap, especially if you’re dealing with illness, family problems, or other burdens.

I do believe there are things that almost anyone (without irrevocable health problems) can do to go from a bad situation to a very good one over the long term (I’ve done them), but these things are not widely known or accepted by mainstream society.

So I sympathize with the sense of futility that many people hold.

"My entire childhood I watched both my parents, who both had 2 jobs, work themselves non-stop to try to provide for us. They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit."

You're here, are you not? Ironically it's Charlie Munger who is not. The game of life is played to stay in the game. If you're writing this comment, it seems like they succeeded, at least in the main storyline. They may have failed or chose not to start a bunch of the side quests, but it looks like they won the primary game.

> For every Charlie Munger there are tons of working poor that get up everyday

Not tons. Millions. If not hundreds of millions.

Billions. It is literally most of us. Wealth concentration is unintuitive in the extreme.

But let’s debate the merits of yet another billionaire lecturing everyone about the merits of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and not being a victim.

Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do. And that’s not necessarily bad. But it’s generally bad when it’s this extreme.

That said I wish his family well and am sorry for his passing. He was always a gentleman and kind to the core.

At least some billionaires created something useful. Finance guys don't create anything, they are just leeches who found ways to game the system.

And most of those billion people will never be on HN. The average HNer is just as wealthy when compared to them as a billionare is when compared to us.

> Hard work doesn’t make billionaires. Systems that accelerate privileged positions and concentrate wealth to the top do.

¿Por qué no los dos? Jeff Bezos worked pretty hard to end up where he is now.

I like the theory that Hacker news seems to follow the human development index fairly accurately.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986

But of course the truth is it’s a 42 year old (avg) man (91%) that makes $88,716 per year so you’re NOT wrong.

But the idea that Jeff Bezos got where he is because of hard work is inverted. Many work hard, few become billionaires. So what is wrong with the argument of los dos?

This: it may be true that hard work is generally a prerequisite for becoming a billionaire, it is a correlation and not causative effect. The cause of billionaires is wealth concentration itself and a system of overly generous tax advantage for equity owners. That is why the majority of billionaires have sprung from finance and investments — highly leveraged paper wealth from paper products — and not from the likes of Amazon.

I subscribe to the idea that billionaires are a product of the tax system and not the result of some kind of superhuman top-of-heap exceptional personal merit.

>”And most of those billion people will never be on HN. The average HNer is just as wealthy when compared to them as a billionare is when compared to us.”

You’re severely underestimating how much a billion dollars is if you really think this is true.

The wealth of an average HNer is much more comparable to the average American than to the wealth of billionaires.

It's really funny reading his "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" lecture and citing himself as an example, and offhandedly mentioning his numerous wealthy relatives.

Coming from a rich family doesn't primarily make things easy; it nearly eliminates the consequences of risk-taking and allows for failing until you stop failing.

People who aren't wealthy can't take the gambles and risks the wealthy do.

Jim Carey has a quote about his Dad: “My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn’t believe that that was possible for him, and so he made a conservative choice. Instead, he got a safe job as an accountant, and when I was 12 years old, he was let go from that safe job, and our family had to do whatever we could to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father. Not the least of which was that: You can fail at what you don’t want. So you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

The "avoid thinking like you're a victim" is a tool to help motivation and attitude but not sufficient for success. You have to be smart enough to know the meta-model of inputs and outputs in the world to maximize your chance of ending up where you want to be.

You could work as hard as possible flipping burgers, it won't make you a billionaire, and even a very dumb person could see that.

You have to merely understand the paths people take in life that lead to where you want to be, evaluate the stochastic horizons, and act in accordance to your best bet on what would work. Whether or not, in this process, you consider yourself the ultimate master of your circumstances or a helpless victim flailing at the machinery of a cruel system makes no difference. All that matters is what affects how you think and what you do, and all the feedback loops therein.

> They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.

Not doing those things didn't enable them to get ahead far enough to not have to both work two jobs. But drinking or doing drugs would have hurt compared to not doing them. So would feeling like a victim.

>They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.

Are you saying that your family would have been the same had your parents done drugs or considered themselves victims?

If so, why do you think that? Seems like a very bold claim. If not, what are you actually saying?

I think they're saying the interaction effect of doing drugs, drinking and considering oneself a victim is negligible on overall success.

It doesn't seem like a bold claim to me. I've known plenty of poor, struggling working class people. The only impact drinking or claiming they're a victim have is influencing how much fun they have at parties.

I've happen to know plenty of wildly successful people who also drink and/or think they're victims. Again, primary effect I've noticed seems to be how much fun they are at parties.

I think the end point is that if more people were able to admit when they're a victim, instead of being shamed for it; then change could occur.

Until you’ve actually failed hard for a very long time - over a decade - and then get a solid kick in the teeth for your efforts, and power through that shit with an optimistic attitude to succeed beyond your own expectations, it’s hard to buy into what Charlie is saying, but I can assure you it’s the absolute truth. You can’t change the hand your dealt or what life continues to deal you, but you can keep working smart and hard to solve it and that’s going to give you a pretty damn good shot.

> You can’t change the hand your dealt or what life continues to deal you, but you can keep working smart and hard to solve it and that’s going to give you a pretty damn good shot.

This reads like "pick yourself up by your bootstraps": an impossible task. Could you parrot this line in front of a Walmart checkout clerk?

So what is the upper limit of how hard someone should work until they can reasonably acknowledge that shit is fucked up and that they're a victim of circumstance? Should I just power through chronic fatigue for 10, 20, 30 years before applying for disability (which forever limits how much wealth I am allowed to accumulate)? Should someone just keep fighting a fatal cancer diagnosis, throwing their family into incalculable medical debt, until they die with a crushed ribcage from a nurse slamming their dead heart through the sternum because they're full code?

I think he lived his own advice.

"At 31 years old, Charlie Munger was divorced, broke, and burying his 9 year old son, who had died from cancer"

But he persevered to become one of the most successful people on the planet.

No doubt he was a brilliant human and that helped tremendously, but he didn't think of himself as a victim.

I think you're missing the point. The idea is more that avoiding a victim mentality typically leads to better outcomes. This isn't a surefire guarantee, but statistically, it tends to yield more favorable results.

E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.

Applying this to your specific case, if your parents had embraced a victim mentality, there's a likelihood that they would have experienced less success, happiness, etc.

An article that included statistical data to that point would not have received this criticism.

Instead this article is just the assertions of Charlie Munger.

> E.g if we plot the range of outcomes for two groups of people, one group embracing a victim mentality and the other not, we'd likely see two power-law curves. However, the curve representing those without a victim mentality would generally trend higher, indicating more positive outcomes.

What exactly is this based on? Because it _feels_ right? Because it aligns with your own personal beliefs of what makes someone successful?

The article's framing is very clearly "Successful Man has this advice to be successful" but there's no reason given for why this advice is correct in any meaningful way. So, like I said, it might even be good advice, but it's just an appeal to authority. Successful Man said it, and it sounds like common sense, so it must be true.

For all we know, people that feel victimized by a system might be _more_ likely to want to take action to reform the system. There's no data presented, there's just an anecdote about a time when he faced a hardship and didn't adopt victimhood.

How long could Mr. Munger have kept up this belief system had he not met with success. How important was this mindset when compared to the other incredible benefits he received, here's a leg up he had taken from the very beginning of his Wikipedia article.

> Through the GI Bill Munger took a number of advanced courses through several universities.[6] When he applied to his father's alma mater, Harvard Law School, the dean of admissions rejected him because Munger had not completed an undergraduate degree. However, the dean relented after a call from Roscoe Pound, the former dean of Harvard Law and a Munger family friend.

It is quite easy not to adopt a victim mentality when your family friends can reverse a rejection to Harvard Law.

From your bio it appears that they raised a software engineer. That has to count right?

You are missing the point. It is not about misfortune. Yes there are millions of people like your parents who worked hard and struggled to provide. But did they choose to be victims ? No. You can have misfortune and still choose not be a victim and blame others. Also, turns out that they did a decent job raising you where you are able to be a software engineer (from your HN profile). So I would say they won. Wouldn't you ?

> They didn't drink or do drugs or consider themselves victims, and it didn't help one bit.

I think this highlights the culturally ingrained measures of success that most of us default to reflexively.

In a world where most of the circumstances around us are out of our control, finding a way to live without falling into victimhood is success by some measures.

Here’s how I think about this: falling into a victim mindset is a good way to stay stuck. Finding a way to avoid this mindset doesn’t guarantee someone will get unstuck, but it increases the odds. And if they stay stuck, they’re only dealing with the circumstance they’re in instead of also dealing with the added layer of psychological distress of victimhood.

I think it’s also critical to still call out fallacious ideas, e.g. being underpaid is a real issue that needs to be solved.

The thing about victimhood is that it primarily impacts the person who engages in the thought patterns and doesn’t actually change the situation for the better. In terms of pure utility, it’s not worth the brain cycles.

This does not mean that the circumstances that lead to the mindset are not serious issues that need to be solved.

> There are a many number of people that don't adopt a victim mentality, work hard, and try to get ahead and just don't.

Yes, but so what. We're on HN, we're supposed to be well aware that 90% if not 99% of all ventures will fail miserably. (In fact, the main benefits of 'working hard' in startup culture are arguably ancillary ones, such as the chance of networking socially with successful folks. To some extent, success is beside the point.)