Calling Steve Jobs ‘Lucky’ Would Be A Sin | Hacker News Reader

Calling Steve Jobs ‘Lucky’ Would Be A Sin

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9 pointsnpguy12 comments

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Steve Jobs was born in the USA. Massive edge right there.

Lived in California during the dawn of the personal computing age.

Met Woz.

These 3 coincidences put him ahead of billions of other people. And they are coincidences. They're luck.

Luck matters; we just don't like to admit it -- http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/

Luck matters. But it is not the only thing that matters.

This is the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes. Luck is still necessary, just as genius was necessary, a certain course of action was necessary etc.

Good lord. There's gotta be some logical fallacy named after this.

Yes, all these things happened by some fortunate cosmic happenstance. But that is true for everything. Take away a few key pieces from a flow in history, and the flow might not have taken place at all.

The point is that, statistically, such fortunate confluences happen all the time. Only a few produce a flow that blazes a trail. And it does have a lot to do with the characteristics of the people who find themselves at the cusp of it.

Could someone else have been as successful as Steve had these early things happened to them? Maybe, maybe not.

Could someone else have been as successful as Steve had some other set of fortunate events come together? Maybe, maybe not.

It is silly to take away from a person, and attribute it all to luck.

> It is silly to take away from a person, and attribute it all to luck.

And where, exactly, did I do that?

You can win three times Lottery Jackpot and you still wouldn't create a damn thing that is anywhere near Apple's Product. Not that they are insanely great, but no one would put label them as cheap, crap or mindlessly crafted.

And you can met Woz, but you would still have failed creating a company. And properly failed miserably.

Steve Lived at the dawn of the personal computing age, and got kicked butt by IBM, M$ and Intel. Wow. Lucky

He got kicked out of his own founding company. Extremely Lucky.

There are properly some luck involved in every successful billionaires, Bill Gate for exmaple. But Steve, I would put him as the last one on the list.

So Yes. It is a Sin.

I believe that being born in the USA, being in California and meeting Woz were all necessary causes. Without them Steve Jobs might have run an insanely great yoga studio.

So yeah. Luck.

I've heard Jobs called a lot of things over the years (mostly the C word, if we're honest), but lucky? As in "merely" lucky? Nah.

The guy had a head on his shoulders, you've got to give him that.

These kind of debates are so boring they actually make you appreciate reading VB code.

Surely, you meant J2EE?

Nope, nobody deserves that much.

Don't mess with the narrative. If hard work isn't the only thing that contributes to success you're going to destroy a lot of people's entire world view. But yes he was lucky. Just like the fact I'm a programmer right now has a lot to do with being lucky that my accountant father brought home an IBM PC from work in 1980. The choice to actually spend time learning how the computer worked, while an important choice, was secondary to the luck in being one of a fairly small number of people with a personal computer in 1980.

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