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Comment by benterix | Hacker News Reader

It's a cliche but people really underestimate and try to downplay the role of luck[0].

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/beautiful-minds/the-...

People also underestimate the value of maximizing opportunities for luck. If we think of luck as random external chance that we can't control, then what can we control? Doing things that increase your exposure to opportunities without spreading yourself too thin is the key. Easier said than done to strike that balance, but getting out there and trying a lot of things is a viable strategy even if only a few of them pay off. The trick is deciding how long to stick with something that doesn't appear to be working out.

Sure helps to be born wealthy, go to private school, and Ivy League college.

Luck. And capturing strong network effect.

The ascents of the era all feel like examples of anti-markets, of having gotten yourself into an intermediary position where you control both side's access.

Success happens when luck meets hard work.

And timing

Ability vastly increases your luck surface area. A single poker hand has a lot of luck, and even a game, but over long periods, ability starts to strongly differentiate peoples' results.

Win a monster pot and you can play a lot of more interesting hands.

Except you can play hundreds of thousands of poker hands in your lifetime, but only have time/energy/money to start a handful of businesses.

Sure, but within running a single business, there are a huge number of individual events. Those are the hands.

That's where the analogy starts to fall apart then. Because the variance in those decisions is not very similar, since you're sampling very different underlying distributions. And estimating the priors for a problem like "what is the optimal arrangement of tables to maximize throughput in a cafe" is very different from a problem like "what is the current untapped/potential demand for a boardgaming cafe in this city, and how profitable would that business be".

The main reason why professional poker players are playing the long-game, is because they're consistently playing the same game. Over and over.

Heh yes, it's not as controlled, but there are repeated tasks like analysis, communicating, intuiting things, creating things, etc. And the tasks have more variability, but if you're better at these skills, you'll tend to do better. And if you do much better at a lot of them, then you're more likely to succeed than someone working on the same business who isn't very good at them. Starting a business is also a long game with a lot of these subtasks.

Every billionaire could have died from childhood cancer.

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