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Comment by bedobi | Hacker News Reader

Hard agree on this. In my career and life in general I see so many people and organizations delude themselves that they have to be the best of the best or find gimmicky ways to stand out or whatever.

Like, no. In 99% of contexts, you literally just have to do the basics well, and you will already be beating AT LEAST half of your competition, probably closer to 80% of your competition.

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Beating just half the competition is often not enough though, it depends on how the rewards are distributed in your field.

I think that's fair. In "ordinary" professions, producing solid work, as promised, is probably good enough for a lot of situations. It probably won't work so well for a professional athlete or for an actor that looking to do something other than small-time stuff.

> In "ordinary" professions

Are these motivational articles about "ordinary" careers? If you want an ordinary career just be ordinary, no need to worry about greatness.

I think they meant any career where the rewards are not dominated by a very small number of people.

For example, many/most? professional musicians struggle to make ends meet, but a small number make millions.

By comparison e.g. tech careers are nowhere near winner-take-all.

Right. Typical professional careers generally reward consistent performers pretty well even if they're not 10x, CEO material, etc. That is not true of tournament jobs where the very top people can (in some cases) do really well and everyone else is doing it for love and tips.

CEO material seems like kind of a myth to me. Politics and business isn't like sport - you consistently see people at the top of the top with track records that simply don't add up and simple aren't what landed them there. So there has to be something else that lands them there...

To be clear, of course there are CEOs who really are the best, but in my experience yeah someone being a CEO doesn't mean they're smarter or better at business or whatever even than the average employee at the company lol.

expanding on previous - I think it's mistake to believe that tournament style careers are necessarily meritocracies, also. In some areas the incentives line up to make it pretty pure, but not always. I suspect you can argue that the knock on effects in all of them make it a bit of an amplifier anyway.

Politics provides lots of examples.

I suspect their point was more that CEO slots are much more winner-takes-all.

Certainly, there are out-sized payoffs at tech companies. But the typical dev at most companies still does a lot lot better relative to Taylor Swift's roadies.

Relatedly, the majority of CEOs probably make similar wages to software developers (e.g. < 200k) . But the top end is skewed with 8-9 figure salaries, and there are orders of magnitudes fewer of them.

Guilty. It's a lesson I have to relearn every once in a while

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