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Comment by Desafinado | Hacker News Reader

It's been my experience that business success is less about intelligence, and more about the right combination of intelligence and motivation. Succeeding as an entrepreneur takes an extreme amount of work and fortitude that has to come along with your intelligence.

And motivation counts for more than intelligence. A genius who doesn't want to do anything but read and collect a secure pay-cheque isn't cut out to be an entrepreneur. Where someone who has the pure motivation to build a business, but less brute force intelligence, is much more likely to actually do so.

Basically the upper limit of our earning potential is limited by how much work and stress we're willing to take on, not how smart we are. And this explanation also doesn't dive into the equally important requisite of social skill.

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This is honestly a bad answer. You can have all of the motivation in the world. But if you don’t know how to create products that people want, market it, have funding for it and not get crushed by a larger company that can throw a team at it, you won’t be successful.

The world is filled with the corpses of dead companies founded by people with “motivation” and “passion”.

The whole idea of if you work really hard you are guaranteed success gives too many people unrealistic hope

Fair, but you seemed to miss the part where I described intelligence as nearly important as motivation. It's just that I'd give motivation a greater importance. You need to be smart enough to run a business, but more importantly you need the drive.

Intelligence doesn’t help either, there are thousand of smart people who tried to start a business and failed.

Each part is necessary, but in itself not sufficient.

Successful business takes hard work, the right work, done well, reaching a market that needs it and can afford it.

Motivation by itself is worthless. Working on the wrong thing is worthless. Working hard on the wrong thing is worthless.

Being smart isn't about doing Integral Calculus. It's about deciding to work on the right thing.

Most of all a business needs to reach customers who want what you are selling, and can afford what you need to charge.

To the OP I say "I don't know you, but i expect you looked for product first, then first customers. Switch to finding customers first, then worry about the product."

Once you have that then you'll need motivation, hard work and indeed some luck.

So if that’s all it takes? Then why are so many businesses failures? I bet if you got in a room with 30 people and they all told you their story without mentioning the outcome and you could judge the characteristics you mentioned and they were all equal, you couldn’t predict which ones are successful business people and which ones are failures.

On the other hand, if you gave 10 people a job at BigTech, 10 a job at a well known non tech company and told 10 to go start a business, which one of those groups do you think would have the highest median and mean compensation history over 5 years? 10 years?

I posit that it would be BigTech, Enterprise Dev and the startup founders would come in dead last.

Heck I got close to a million dollars in “revenue” just working as a mid level (L5) remote employee at BigTech for 3.5 years and I was paid 10-15% less in my position (cloud consulting) than the equivalent SDE.

If that were my major concern at this point in life (I’m 50), there are much easier ways to have a million dollars in “revenue” over 3-4 years for anyone in tech than starting a business with much less work and risks.

> So if that’s all it takes? Then why are so many businesses failures? I bet if you got in a room with 30 people and they all told you their story without mentioning the outcome and you could judge the characteristics you mentioned and they were all equal, you couldn’t predict which ones are successful business people and which ones are failures.

Luck. Or, IOW, random variation. In physics, you could probably predict the position[1] of every atom in a confined volume of a gas, if you knew all their initial positions and velocities with sufficient precision... But that required precision is so high, and the effects of any infinitesimal deviation from the true state has such far-reaching chaotic effects, that it's in practice pretty much impossible.

Same with the social sciences, economy, and "the market" (whichever market it is you're entering): Random impossible-to-measure tiny variations add up to a chaotic sum of effects that manifests as what is usually called "good" -- or "bad" -- "luck", which probably accounts for almost as much of your success as anything you do (or don't do).

> On the other hand, if you gave 10 people a job at BigTech, 10 a job at a well known non tech company and told 10 to go start a business, which one of those groups do you think would have the highest median and mean compensation history over 5 years? 10 years?

> I posit that it would be BigTech, Enterprise Dev and the startup founders would come in dead last.

Yup, I'd guess so too... For N = 10 or so. Add an order of magnitude, and the mean might rise enormously -- though not the median.

[1]: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle notwithstanding.

> Successful business takes hard work, the right work, done well, reaching a market that needs it and can afford it.

And luck. Or, to put it another way -- which kind of is luck: What "the right work" is, and whether you reach your market or not, is influenced by so many other hard-to-predict things besides your own input, that getting it right among all these confounding factors is pretty much the definition of "luck".

Every dead body on Mt. Everest was a motivated, hard working person.

> But if you don’t know how to create products that people want, market it, have funding for it and not get crushed by a larger company that can throw a team at it, you won’t be successful.

Yes, but you can keep trying. In entrepreneurship, you only need to be right once. Most successful entrepreneurs have had failed startups and projects before they got it right.

>The whole idea of if you work really hard you are guaranteed success gives too many people unrealistic hope

It's not guaranteed, but it's the best system to get what you want, that we have.

> Yes, but you can keep trying. In entrepreneurship, you only need to be right once

And how many entrepreneurs are “right” enough to make up for the years of lost wages they could make even as ordinary CRUD enterprise devs let alone working for BigTech or adjacent? Not to mention the compounding returns if they had invested the money early?

HN especially suffers from survivorship bias. You don’t hear about all of the failed founders who are in their 30s and 40s with nothing to show for it and unemployable.

The “best” system is to “grind leetCode and work for a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerqyestions). Even the second best system of working your way up through enterprise dev is much more likely to succeed.

You're making fair points although I'll just add that I didn't claim that success was easy, I just described the minimum requirements for success. It's always going to be a gamble.

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