[dkarl]

At one time I thought highly successful people would be more like each other than less successful people. I believed it even more when it was explained as the Anna Karenina principle. But my experience hasn't borne it out. There are many things you can point to as advantages or "best practices" but in the end it all seems to dissolve into our penchant for telling stories. One guy is successful because he was born into it, it's all he saw growing up, every element was demonstrated for him and instilled in him as normal his whole life. Another guy is successful because he was born with nothing and had to fight for every little thing, and he kept fighting for the next thing until he had a whole company. These are both coherent stories, but they don't explain the difference between those two and all the other people who were born to success but reverted to the mean or who were born into poverty and stayed there.

I've seen people succeed with vastly different, contradictory strategies. I've seen engineers promoted to management earn respect by getting in the weeds and doing unwanted grunt work, and I've seen engineers promoted to management stay so hands-off from technical stuff that new employees assumed they were MBAs who didn't understand the work they were managing. I've seen people with humble origins flaunt them at every opportunity and others all but deny them. I've seen people who immersed themselves in detail to see the whole picture and people who carefully rationed the information they consumed to avoid being overwhelmed, systematically delegating the responsibility for details.

Conclusion: that's the wrong way to try to understand the difference between luck and skill. Suppose you ran a huge experiment where you had 1000 chess grandmasters, 1000 masters, 1000 good amateurs, and so on down to 1000 chronic duffers, and they each inherited a thousand games starting at move eight (crediting the first seven moves to luck, circumstances, and childhood.) You wouldn't learn much by asking whether the winners attacked or defended, opened the middle or jammed it up, preferred their knights or their bishops. Those aren't the right questions. A grandmaster doesn't move a knight just because she likes knights, or because moving knights is the baller thing that all the grandmasters do. It's because it accomplishes something in their situation. If life was a game you could play over and over again, with executive control gradually fading in starting in the teenage years, a brilliant player might play each lifetime very differently. It's an interesting thought experiment to ask what skills you would develop as you "played" dozens or hundreds of lifetimes! Certainly not rigid rules like "wake up at 5am" or "wear the same thing every day."

[dtujmer]

Wow. This is honestly the best analogy I've ever seen. I still think that some particular behaviors are generally good and should be emulated (like e.g. exercise) - but even there you'll find exceptions. But taking CEO quirks and designing lives so that they include them... That's just guessing the teacher's password (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...).

[galfarragem]

The analogy of inheriting a position in a game played by somebody else is great. Winning or loosing depends on how you finish it. What I can't agree is using chess itself: in chess there's no luck, if you play better than your opponent you will certainly win. In life, even after you inheriting the position, luck is a relevant factor, and the better player can loose.

Paraphrasing Nassin Taleb, a good player is somebody that optimises the chances of black swans to happen in life. But even this might no grant you a win.

[pythonaut_16]

I appreciate that your conclusion was that the starting position helps determine the strategy necessary for success, rather than your starting position already determining your ability to succeed.

A lot of comments in these kinds of threads just assume a kind of fatalism that success is determined purely by change and the circumstances of your birth.

[dasil003]

This is exactly right. Setting overly ambitious goals from a young age is likely to prevent one from developing mastery and capitalizing on the serendipity that leads to great opportunities. You can’t manufacture success, but you can set yourself up to get lucky.