[joshstrike]

Meh. Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.

How does he explain all the happy-go-lucky young fliberdygibbits who ended up serendipitously taking their first job offer in 1998 from Pets.com? Or those of us who labored under the impression that "as soon as DataPower takes off" there'll be bonuses raining from the sky?

Right time, right place. Right age group. Right skill set. 25% of the above are things you can plan for.

[pg]

I think PB is too consistent to dismiss him as merely lucky. He didn't just happen to be an early employee at Google. He also wrote GMail (which entailed not only a redesign of the email experience, but also was a pretty dramatic evolutionary step in web apps because of its then extreme use of Javascript), built the first version of AdSense, and was the one who came up with "Don't be evil." It's unlikely to be a coincidence.

Nor does he have a hard time explaining what he did. He has spoken several times at Startup School about his approach to solving problems. I've learned a lot from him.

[joshstrike]

I'm not saying the guy isn't smart. Just throwing out a little "outliers" to grease the wheel for the rest of us donkeys.

Sometimes reasons to hope are not best expressed by those who have nothing to regret. This is one of those times.

[pg]

There are few people over the age of 5 who have nothing to regret, and I don't think PB is one of them.

[dschobel]

I'm with you on this one. After the initial 'serendipity' of google, PB's reputation was sealed and he could pick his title and company.

While it's interesting to speculate if PB had chosen a pets.com instead of google what would have happened to his career, it's not particularly constructive.

The idea that our success is largely beyond our control is sufficiently pernicious that we're all better off just pretending it is not the case and keeping our heads down and trying our damnedest.

[nl]

If PB had been at Pets.com then I'm guessing FriendFeed would have involved feeding dogs?

[paul]

You seem to be missing the point.

There are no guarantees. Ever. Our lives are ruled chance. You can't duplicate my life, but you can create an interesting life of your own.

[zb]

There are no guarantees of success. It's usually possible to guarantee failure, e.g. by not returning the call.

[raganwald]

Survivor bias is the phrase that comes to mind. The other one is "notoriety bias:" Only the stories with a spectacular ending get made into movies, so you read about the big successes and the big failures, but nothing in between.

[joshstrike]

Yeah, I know. Meanwhile, there's now an industry built on telling children their dreams really can come true if they accrue enough ycombinator karma. Way to harness that aptitude, baby.

edit: yeah, rate me down for telling you what you didn't want to hear. I'm not the one who throws $18k at a time down a well just to get a high school kid to suck up to me and think I'm a god.

[nostrademons]

I thought the point of the article was not to have dreams, but rather to be awake to the world around you, because much of the goodness in it will pass you by if you're fixated on something else.

[dannyr]

I seriously don't want to live in your world.

So what would you tell kids? Do not aspire for anything because chances are, you will likely fail.

You can choose how you look at things.

"For every good story, there is a bad story."

"For every bad story, there is a good story."

I choose the latter.

[luckystrike]

Well all the 'young fliberdygibbits' who started with pets.com might not be successful by "your" definition, but majority of them might be very happy in their lives by their own standards.

There could very well be a cafe owner down the road who might exactly say the same thing about serendipity as PB did in this blog post. He could be happy with the choices he made in his lifetime and the chances he took that got him all that is good in his life (by his definition).

It all comes down to whether a person has a positive outlook or not. One can keep regretting the things that didn't work out, or choose to see the good things in his/her life.

[jseliger]

Lucky people always love to talk about how easy it is if you just do what they did - though they usually have a hard time explaining exactly what it was that they did.

I just posted an interview with the writer and professional asshole Tucker Max, who said almost the same thing: http://jseliger.com/2010/10/22/tucker-max-interview-assholes... :

Tucker Max: People create all these narratives explaining away why they haven’t had the courage to take their personal path, or explaining away my success, or anyone else. Anyone who succeeds in anything, there’s always going to be people who don’t have the courage to do that. They get upset about it, either explain it away, or dismiss it away.

JS: It sounds like you almost found out by accident. In Assholes Finish First you say that when you and your friends graduated from law school, “We were slowly realizing that the ‘real life’ we’d chosen really fucking sucked. A lot.” Sounds like you’re trying to tell people how not to do that.

TM: As much as I’d like to sit here and be like, “Yeah, I had the courage to do all this stuff, and I had the vision to see where I was gonna go and I knew I would get there.” That’s fuckin’ bullshit. That’s not true. That’s the narrative I might tell when I’m 70, and I can’t remember all this stuff.

JS: Trying to inspire your grandkids?

TM: Right. The true, true story is it’s a combination of some determination and some talent on my part. Some talent, a lot of determination, a lot of luck, and a lot of serendipity. And a lot of failure. I was fired—

JS: There’s a section about failure in the book.

TM: I was fired from the legal profession, basically. I wasn’t just fired from Fenwick and West—you read the first book, the story’s in there. I got fired in such a public way that there was almost no way I was going to get back into law. I would have to go back and be a public defender or something if I wanted to be a lawyer. Seriously.

[run4yourlives]

That's nothing more than ego-fear in the extreme - after all, you don't have to step out of your comfort zone, success is just luck.

This, of course, isn't true at all.