Hacker News Reader

Comment by litewulf | Hacker News Reader

People have a vested interest in thinking their success is the product of their own hard work...

The corollary to this is that people also have a vested interest in thinking their failure is the product of bad luck or circumstances outside of their control.

Yep. This kind of thinking is actually healthy for our mental health as well.

One more corollary is that people have a vested interest in thinking their failure is because of other people's successes.

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

Is something different

Of course they do. That doesn't mean their success isn't from their hard work. If you are raised in a culture of hard work, it is no surprise that you succeed. If you are raised in a culture of hanging out smoking blunts guess what happens? Immigrants are some of the most astoundingly successful people in the country and they often start with nothing. Victimology is self fulfilling.

You miss the point of the article, which is that it's not victimology to understand that social mobility depends on a lot more than talent or hard work, and that you have to be either young or naive to believe that that's all it takes.

I'm currently reading a biography of one of the most famous and successful British rock bands. The core of the band met at a famous public school. They had:

1. Spare money to buy instruments and equipment, including vans and cars

2. Plenty of rehearsal opportunities - often in very large country houses or grand cottages where they stayed for free

3. Direct access to successful people in their immediate social circles

4. No immediate financial pressures. (Not that they were rich. But they were never in danger of starving or becoming homeless.)

They happened to be very talented. But without those opportunities the talent would not have been enough, and they would have had to join most of their peers in ordinary jobs.

Class is a network of opportunities that is denied to outsiders. It's also about learned social confidence within the network.

A few 'Well I made it so you can too' anecdotes are beside the point. A few people always do make it, no matter what.

The real issue is the number who don't, in spite of best efforts and hard work, and of the talent and hard work wasted in a culture of low social mobility.

The failures never appear in Fortune, but they're out there in their millions.

The article states that the two main factors are family and money. I am of the opinion that family is the much more important, and difficult to solve factor but everyone wants to focus on the money. Growing up rich gives advantages for success, but in my opinion growing up middle class makes it much more likely you will be a success, not just slowly squandering your inheritance. It is hard to have a strong work ethic if you don't have to work for anything. The phrase helpless as a rich man's child comes to mind. We should concentrate on helping families stay together.

Most of it is. Your dad can be LeBron James and you can inherit all his genes, physical characteristics, and natural abilities, but if you don't want to practice 4 hours a day, practice while the other players are playing video games, staying up late, drinking beer and eating junk food, you're not going to be successful in basketball.

Being born into a better family gives you a better chance but it doesn't guarantee you anything, just like being born into a worse family gives you a worse chance but doesn't completely eliminate the chance of success for you. 90% of it is your effort in either case.

> 90% of it is your effort in either case.

No, it's not anywhere near 90%. That is a number you pulled out of your ass that is diametrically opposed to every finding from the study described in the article.

Hard to sustain the fiction that people deserve or earned their outcomes if hard work/effort/gumption/ambition doesn't make up the vast majority of the equation.

Establishing that most/many people are effectively doomed from birth even in the US takes a lot of the validity out of the "personal responsibility" argument.

"90% of it is your effort in either case."

Even so it's not that simple. If you see your parents - and all the 'mature' people in your life - doing things a certain way, then that it is the "right" way. If what they are doing is complaining how they're ont getting what's rightfully there's (vs working to make it something they earn) -- then you're going to believe that too.

In order to be able to put in the effort required, you first have to have your eyes opened to the fact that there are better ways of doing things than what you're living with every day. WOrse, you have to accept that the people you've been looking up to may be wrong about important, fundamental things.

That hurdle - that awakening to possibility - is so much bigger than any of the rest of the effort required, because people don't generally know what they don't know.

Ugh. "theirs"

I am very skeptical of the claim that 90% of the variation between the performance of the average professional basketball player and LeBron James is effort.

> 90% of it is your effort in either case.

I think that's an over-simplification. Maybe better put as: 90% of successes required putting in a great effort.

But how many equal efforts did not result in success?

I think it's fair to consider the effort (which undoubtedly is less and less important to success the more resources you start with) a minimum barrier to entry. But I don't think it automatically follows that the effort you put into something is a very good gauge of success. Or even that it's a differentiator between success and failure.

Lebron James was already playing basketball and being noticed by coaches when he was 9 years old. He was incredibly lucky to be in that position. At 9 years old 100% of you do in life is your genetics, environment and luck.

You also can't possibly believe any significant part of the difference between Lebron James and lesser basketball pros is due to effort and dedication unless you assume everybody else is lazy and partying when Lebron is practicing. He is the best (or one of the best) out of hundreds of extremely dedicated professionals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com