My opinion is that success is always accidental. You are the product of your DNA and your environment. There are no great men. Only great situations (see multiple origin of inventions/scientific progress/businesses).
Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.
I've been gestating an essay about "useful lies" for a while now. Some things that we know aren't truly true are embraced as if they are true because of the utility of doing so.
So for example, believing that success is not related to luck. It's untrue, in my estimation. But if you truly accept it you wind up with silly notions like Insha'Allah and nothing much gets achieved.
Or take realism/legalism in law. Sure, judges are biased, judges affect policy yadda yadda. But actually embracing that reality makes the legal system work less well. Meanwhile, "strict and complete legalism" is a bit of a nonsense, but judges who embrace it have higher utility because their judgements are more likely to be respected and accepted.
The reason I haven't written it is because I've kinda written it already[1] and I can't think of a better way to explain what I'm trying to convey.
I'm also deeply uncomfortable with being caught between the essential unknowability of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me.
[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
That's pretty lucky.
Does that make want to give up - throw my hands up in the air and say - What will be will be? Hell no.
I merely appreciate the gifts I've been given. I try not to attribute any success to my own hard work and study, and I try to do the best with what I have got. Knowing that my existence is particularly random/arbitrary doesn't really change what I do. It merely changes how I see the world around me.
Same way I view the universe really. Its existence is fairly random. There really isn't really any point to it. It'll eventually die, and so will everyone else I know. Does that make me say - What's the point - nothing matters? Not really.
It makes me cherish everything I've been given (life/liberty/health), it emboldens me to enjoy the little life that I have been given.
Life is pretty amazing. It's also pretty random. I revel in the arbitrariness of it all while I can.
And some of it is I think evolved. Optimism is the grease that oils capitalism, probably because optimistic ancestors took risks that in some cases paid off. Sure, most optimists failed horribly. But the payoffs for the lucky ones were sufficiently high to offset the cost. Thus optimism can become a dominant strategy. (I'm spitballing; the problem with evopsych is that it's all smart-sounding just-so stories that can't be tested).
I mean I'm in the same boat. I'm working on a product which is specifically connected to questions of luck, risk, variance, human bias and so forth. If I am honest with myself the base rate / reference class forecast is that I will probably fail horribly. The rational thing to do would be to present my credentials at a big company.
And yet ...