Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success? I don't think the correlation is 1.0, but I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
108 Billion humans have ever lived on planet earth. 8 billion-ish currently.
Most of them live lives that in no way reflected on their hard work and talent, but rather their circumstances, starting with where and when they were born but encompassing a million different contingencies outside the control of their hard work or talent.
So do you think you have talent and hard work greater than 99% of those many billions? If you're posting on HN you've probably got "success" in that extreme even if you've never applied yourself or excelled in anything of any note.
You’re arguing that there are other factors that also influence outcomes (and that those other factors are stronger forces).
I agree with that point, but that’s not a refutation to the notion that the coefficients on talent and hard work are positive, nor a convincing argument that success is unrelated to those two factors.
Millions of people had an equal or better starting condition than Mark Zuckerberg so we aren't really lacking privileged people, but vanishingly few of those do become ultra wealthy.
Those are just two different points on the "wealthy" scale. If you zoom out on a global level, they are not very far apart.
The kind of upper-middle class family that produces startup founders tends to be from the rich countries.
It makes perfect sense that it's the pretty wealthy and not the super-wealthy. There's more of the UMC, and they only need a certain amount of social/economic capital to roll the dice.
Humorous analogy: Imagine you’re playing a video game where, through a mix of skill and luck, you stumble upon an incredibly overpowered weapon. With even minimal competence, this weapon lets you easily acquire even more powerful gear, initiating a self-reinforcing loop that rapidly propels you to dominance. Soon enough, your advantage reshapes the entire game—limiting access to similar weapons for other players. The game stops being fun, or as some might put it, it becomes fundamentally unfair.
Without forced redistribution of wealth/power that set hard limits you're going to get a runaway, and the whole thing melts down.
This won't happen if the people with wealth/power care about consequences and have the wisdom to model outcomes accurately. But the kinds of people who care about consequences in capitalism are unlikely to be chasing huge wealth in the first place.
The system cannot work. It's fundamentally manic depressive, alternating between irrationally exuberant booms and catastrophic crashes, and consuming talent and raw materials for self-defeating ends.
But, I do know for sure that being wealthy is correlated to neither skill nor hard work, but savvy leverage of the skill and hard work of others. That shit has to end. You should make proportional to the work you put in. Shareholders and investors are even worse.
But whatever. I do not expect the world to improve at this point. We’re just stuck in a shitty place (as humanity) and asked to be grateful for the insight of the rich.
Throughout the 20th century we have seen what such a social structure leads to: millions of deaths from hunger. And always, without exception: the transition to work-based economy - and in the next decade the population becomes many times poorer and a huge percentage of the population dies of starvation.
So no thanks. Between shareholders and investors, and starvation, I choose shareholders and investors.
It's complex.
This is the thread GP was supposed to be a reply to:
> > Does anyone actually believe that hard work and talent are either zero or negatively correlated to success?
> I do.
Any of us could get hit by a meteor or drop dead at any minute, but working harder towards goals in aggregate moves us towards those goals, so I don't understand how this logic works?
I used to lake to say that both hard work and luck were necessary, but neither sufficient, for outsized success. But as our economy has gone down the path of more and more inequality and winner-take-all markets, the luck becomes ever more important because at the very, very top it is more like a lottery.
That is, I think Zuckerberg and others like him have a lot of unique skills, but I can guarantee at least a thousand other people have skills similar or better, but who didn't experience just the perfect set of circumstances to be a mega billionaire. Those 1000 other people are not evenly distributed with, say, a bunch of them being mega-hundred billionaires.
The fact is that the circumstances that even allow billionaires to exist in the first place are actually so exceedingly rare that you have to take luck as the primary determinant.
The guy who has made billions needs the stronger form of this karma-like idea.
I choose to actively reject that mindset because doing so motivates me to focus on elements within my control, but if I'm being honest I think they are probably correct, at least from a statistical perspective.
You’ve committed the typical sin on this site of overrating technical prowess and underrating business acumen. There’s a reason so many founder CEOs from his era ended up getting sacked while he’s maintained control and Meta has become the behemoth it is. Next you're going to tell us how Steve Jobs was a charlatan and a cheat.
Is the act of buying a lottery ticket a "rounding error" when it comes to winning the powerball?
By the way, the act of buying a power ball ticket is essentially a rounding error. The odds of winning the grand prize (which is what we're talking about here) is 1 in 292,201,338. That is for all intents and purposes the same as zero.
Even if you just take the advantage of being born in the United States (which, fine, exclude Musk from that list then) 7 of the 10 people on the list, including Zuckerberg, are among 5% "luckiest" people in the world just based on where they were born.
This is eliminating any luck they got from hereditary wealth, geographical location, and catching the surge of value in their respective industry at the exact right time.
The reality is that our measurements of success don’t correlate with “goodness”, they correlate with getting stuff done. And you can do lots of evil stuff pretty easily.
The reason so many rich people seem evil is because they are. You don’t become rich via charity. You become rich by exploiting others and siphoning their success to yourself.
It’s just plainly evident in every sector of our economy. You don’t have to pay for the bad shit you do. Look at tobacco. Tobacco is a zero-value or negative-value industry. The sheer existence of tobacco actively makes the world a worse place.
But guess what? They don’t pay for your COPD medicine. They don’t pay for your congestive heart failure. But they will happily take your money for a carton.
All bad costs are externalizer, and all profit is kept. The end result is obvious. The more good you do, the stupider you are. The more evil you do, the more money you make.
You don't need to make things better to make money.
If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
Really? Telling people, "hey, don't give other's poison, that's bad"... is worse than giving other's poison? You actually believe that?
To give some context, I used to smoke. For a long time!
Nobody wants to smoke. The only people that want you to smoke are the people literally extracting value out of your rotting corpse.
Look, if you actually think those people are better, then whatever. Clearly this isn't something I can dispute or even try to argue against so who cares. Just... find some medication or something, I don't know. This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.
On the later part, your comment was very insightful too, cause you are a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
1) You decide for others what is good for them, implicitly treating their judgements with contempt.
2) When someone suggests that people might have different thresholds and tradeoffs and you probably wouldn't like it if someone who disagrees with you would make life decisions for you with the same moral certitude as you do in 1, you respond with "This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.", dismissive contempt.
The person coming across in these comments is a self-important possibly power-hungry psychopath - exactly what I was talking about. A mini version of the people behind everything from great leap forward and collective farms to white man's burden. I mean you gotta tell these wrong-thinking people how to live their lives correctly, cause you are right and their objections are just some mental defect!
I'm not saying this to be mean, I'm saying it because it's true and you need to know.
You are objectively arguing for things that are _worse for you_, at your own expense, for other people's gain. Other people who don't know you, don't care about you. Who, if you died, not only would they not care, they would not even notice.
That, is pathetic. That, is self-destructive. You are not selfish enough. You are not mean enough. Not only do you allow your exploitation, you revel in it. As if your own desire for your destruction is a moral virtue. As if you are more pure, more forgiving, because you forgive even the ultimate crime against yourself.
Such forgiveness is not a virtue, it is a cancer.
1) The important part is FOR ME. Back to my original comment, some doctors claim you need 5 hours of cardio a week for optimal heart health and some papers even claim prolonged sitting is harmful regardless of exercise. Woe the furniture maker that sold you a chair to sit upon while commenting, they are harming society by destroying your health! You could also think of coffee, beer, meat, sun exposure, gasoline, cycling accidents, extreme sports; or million things known only to the state of California to cause cancer.
Sure, smoking is a lot more harmful than most things, but why is it that you get to decide which tradeoff is reasonable and which isn't?
So,
2) While I was smoking I was engaging in voluntary transactions with tobacco companies.
While tobacco companies are not angels, and do a lot of shitty things tangential to their main function, like most organizations, I am grateful they provided me with cheap, good quality, varied cigarettes back when I wanted them. That itself is in no way evil.
Deciding for others with moral indignation how they should live though, is.
The clothes I'm wearing right now were probably made by a sweatshop laborer working 12 hours a day under awful conditions, getting paid something like 1% of what I make in my tranquil 7 hour workday sitting comfortably at a computer.
I therefore think that just hard work has an almost zero correlation to success by itself.
If you add in "addressing a valuable market", then yes, hard work helps, in that more effort spent addressing that market will likely yield higher rewards. But working hard on something people don't want will not yield success, in my view.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
I got "marble rich" because I knew who the good players were and when one came a long I put my foot over my marble. Once you knew the trick it was impossible not to win on average and be a few marbles better off every day. Even a slight positive over a few weeks turns into a lot.
At a certain point I stopped finding this desirable and felt a bit guilty about it - the marbles were of no use to me really and it was enough to know that I had the trick of succeeding.
I wonder if this is roughly how people get wealthy in real life other than that they don't think "enough".
On average or for a particular person? Maybe on average there’s an effect (r=.4), so there will be many people for whom that correlation is in their individual case actually negative. Some struggle with this notion, and assume success must signal talent or hard work in individual cases. How one defines success matters a lot too. If one is comparing zuck to some random CEO, say collison, can you say zuck is more hardworking or talented? He is more successful on paper, but I doubt he is significantly more hardworking or talented.
It's obviously more complex than this, but I think it's more useful to think of it as a product. You don't need a high value in any of them to succeed, but a tiny value in even one means you need an astronomical value somewhere else.
Every step of that is inaccessible to someone hardworking and talented. So let's say you got lucky once or was born with wealth available to you - you can skip the whole talent and work thing.
Even today high effort jobs tend to be low paying, paper shuffling, or keyboard tapping tends to pay better.
“The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” Barone and Mocetti note on VoxEU. The study was able to exploit a unique data set—taxpayers data in 1427 was digitized and made available online—to show long-term trends of economic mobility.
<https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-14...>
The question is how much ones starting position (that is, birth conditions) predict adult-period wealth and status. Yes, there's clearly movement within ranks, and more at the very top of the rankings than most. But familial wealth trends are empirically quite strongly rooted in status-at birth, from this and numerous other studies.
The person working hard with the same company for 15 years with extensively proven track record and well known impact across the organization?
Or the interview candidate with 5yrs experience?
Yet every time, companies roll out the red carpet for the new guy. He’s probably at least half bluffing and the new company has little concrete evidence of his past performance.
And therefore when people say [some race] makes no difference in [some behaviour], and other people say "Why is it always [some race] when we see [some behaviour]", and others say "the observation that [some race] leads to [some behaviour] is false because 50% of the time I see [some other race] being worse than [some race] in terms of [some behaviour]" they are all completely right, but just focusing on different properties of the distribution.
So back to your example, yes, in the extremes, many people who are ultrawealthy may have had those behaviours. But by far and large those behaviours don't make much of a difference to the overwhelming majority of the population, and therefore it's likely that other factors were far more important in terms of making an ultrawealthy person becoming ultrawealthy in the first place. At best, someone who was destined to be ultrawealthy didn't make it because they didn't have those behaviours, but that's more like winning the lottery and being too forgetful to go cash it in, rather than having characteristics that will help you win the lottery in the first place.
It’s not that interesting or relevant to me whether Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos had talent or work ethic as significant elements of their success. It is interesting and relevant to me as an adult, parent, and mentor the role that talent and hard work play in outcomes for my family and the students I mentor.
I strongly doubt it’s anything other than a positive correlation and believe that the correlation is relevant for normal people.
If anything, your definition is rather tautological: success is the expected outcome of hard work, which cannot be obtained without it.
Whereas in the case of the ultraworthy, the whole point is that hard work cannot reasonably be expected to lead to astronomical wealth in the absence of other factors, and, in the presence of those factors astronomical wealth might even occur without any hard work. So if ultrawealth is one's definition of success, then no hard work is little more than a red herring.
Statistically, no.
I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.
Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.
I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.
Lots of very intelligent and talented people out there. But when you have the good fortune of coming up with a great idea (Facebook in the mid 00's) you have to use your talent to relentlessly implement it.
This is what separates the plebs from the ultra wealthy. Intelligence + talent + idea + implementation = success
Timing plays a huge role in this too.
There's a shockingly large number of people out there with buckets of "intelligence + talent + ideas" who never get the opportunity to move to the "implementation" phase of anything as they're too busy surviving, and the world is all the poorer for it.
As if that cruel ignominy weren't enough on its own, we are also blessed with the spectacle of ignoramuses piling up and blaming the "plebs" for a situation they've no control over. What a double whammy.
For example there're studies that intelligence over 120 is negatively correlated with success as a leader.
I also believe those two things are correlated with genetics (and of course environment/upbringing)
In the case of Zuck, he basically did play a lottery ticket, and a perfect confluence of being in the right place at precisely the right time yielded some success. A million other programmers, working just as hard and just as talented, were trying to make their web app hit at that time and failed.
That's how life is. It is a lottery ticket that Zuck is super rich. And it's a strawman to act as if pointing this out means that hard work and talent don't matter.
And FWIW, the overwhelming predicate of significant business success is sociopathy. I am kind of a broken record on this, but I think Meta's entire business is basically the oxycontin of the online world, and that everyone involved should feel absolute shame about the negative value they bring to the world. Non-sociopaths would have felt shame and changed course when they realized they were getting rich on the mentally ill, conspiracies, misinformation, etc.
Bingo. Now good luck getting such message into heads of star-stuck young folks who dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025, when its all about money.
I work in banking, much better job than startup/faangs could offer here in Europe, at least people aren't so naive when joining. Had a discussion with my boss recently and we figured we have around 40% of management visibly falling under various sociopathic definitions. Not requirement per se but certainly helps thrive up there.
Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.
Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.
Having that skill alone isn't enough because you also need to pick the right journey at the right time, but not having that skill definitely means you won't be a billionaire.
I do think that the primary factor that can lead to billionaire status aside from luck is sort of moral flexibility / shamelessness / irrational risk tolerance above and beyond hard work and talent.
> I firmly believe that it's positive for both.
Alright, setup an experiment and prove it. Should be easy.
Speculation is free. Can't ever be wrong in the land of uncertainty.