There Really Is No Secret | Hacker News Reader

There Really Is No Secret

therereallyisnosecret.com

65 pointszen5330 comments

Hard work and discipline are necessary, but not sufficient for success.

When you get to the top, remember all the breaks you got, and consider giving some breaks to others who are where you are now.

and "be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down."

Not even necessary. Remember the Million Dollar Homepage?

Just in case people aren't familiar with this story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

You're right - sometimes a relatively small amount of work and a staggering amount of timing/luck trumps everything. But usually it's not reproducible:

http://www.sitelogic.co.uk/million-dollar-homepage-successor...

"Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good"

I'm bookmarking this. Just for the times when I need that reminder, like now.

And, if you look at the source, you'll find this comment, too:

  <!-- There really is no secret. It's worth repeating. -->

And in the CSS (http://www.therereallyisnosecret.com/style.css):

  /* There's no secret to CSS either. You just have to try and do it. */

Hah, well done. That's one place I didn't even think looking. ;)

Hard work, discipline, and luck.

Bill Gates didn't become rich just because he worked his ass off. He also had crucial connections (including his parents) that landed him contracts with IBM and others.

Sure, luck is often involved in meteoric success. That's not to say that one must be lucky to be sufficiently successful. Set your sights a little lower than Bill's fortune.

Also, it's worth noticing that wild success is probably possible without luck, but is certainly impossible without hard work and discipline. Focus on what you can control.

One must be at least slightly lucky in order to not undergo a total existence failure due to random quantum fluctuations.

One can't change their luck.

So at the start of an undertaking, it can only be self-defeating to acknowledge it.

Though at the failure of an undertaking, it's certainly cathartic to curse it.

"One can't change their luck."

You can only give yourself more chances to get lucky.

And yet for some reason we treat pre-existing advantages differently than advantage of opportunity. Why?

Entrepreneurs with good fortune shrug their shoulders and accept it while those who inherit money so often feel guilty and are embarrassed by their good fortune.

If you think from the perspective of the actual doer, it might be an admissible, perhaps even superior strategy to focus on "hard work" and "discipline" (where is the difference, btw?) and leave out "luck". But actually, when you're honest about it and take the perspective of an observer, you'd be foolish to focus on those things because you'd see that for every great success that worked hard to get there, there are at least a hundred "failures" (let's just take the conventional notions here) who worked equally hard. It's kind of demotivating though to have to realize that all your hard work is merely the necessary condition of success and that in the end it will be luck that will make the real difference.

Yes. Not only is Oprah's Secret going to fail to increase your luck, but luck is not nearly enough.

Nicolas Nassim Taleb had a few things to say about that. It depends on the environment you choose to compete. In most of them, luck is non-essential. It helps to have it, but that's it. In some though, notably including many kinds of startups, luck is unfortunately necessary.

There is something to be said for the "laws of attraction", albeit not to the degree that the secret goofs get on about.

Aligning your mind in the right direction with a positive output and surrounding yourself with the right crowd can be beneficial in not only recognizing opportunities, but acting on them.

That being said life isn't built on positive thinking alone, so the guy is right, there is no secret.

That's it! Close down the Internet!

The secret is that there is no secret? :)

There is no secret ingredient!

It's funny how the things your parents tell you when you're really little always seem to stay the same, no matter how old you get.

Wouldn't you have to be little multiple times for those things to change?

Well, the older I get, the smarter my parents become.

It's baffling.

It must have taken a lot of hard work and discipline to build that website.

This is actually a really clever way to advertise his real site: http://themeshaper.com

I'm sure a lot of people will follow the funnel from this site to his store. And if they don't he's only out a $10/year domain registration fee and some time.

Even if people don't follow the link, the google juice will.

This is a viral website for the new Transformers, isn't it?

oh my god, my eyes are open

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