[COGlory]

It's not rich hating, it's that there's a billion poor people who weren't passed a silver spoon, worked hard, but ultimately failed in the one key element: luck. Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck. In general, it makes them very unqualified to tell other people how to get rich.

And no I'm not saying rich people are too dumb to understand it, I'm saying that they're trying to rationalize survivorship bias, which pretty much everyone on planet earth does, knowingly, or unknowingly.

I'd highly recommend Fooled by Randomness for more on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fooled_by_Randomness

[jjtheblunt]

The point is he's NOT saying how to get rich...that high expectations aren't a dependable strategy. I took it as he's acknowledging luck happens.

[COGlory]

I'm not sure what he's saying exactly in the article, because it's paywalled. I'm just responding to my parent comment:

>He came from poor to the top and wasn’t passed a silver spoon, so he has enough qualifications to lecture.

[ytx]

I agree that there is a huge component of luck. But that does not invalidate the work, risk, and talent involved. Nobody "succeeds" (in the sense of creating a trillion dollar company) just by "working hard" or "being smart".

The fact is it's a lot harder to create a company or build something new, than to be an employee and "work hard" all your life. There's nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that everyone rich (especially this guy!) is just luck is ludicrous.

[m3kw9]

You got some points but hard work does put one in position to get lucky. By participating and choosing to work hard and focus on one thing over the other, you are taking risk and there is a reward to that risk and luck comes into play. So give both worked hard, and one got luckier and more rich it shouldn’t lower his status. If he was born rich, that would help your argument

[deciplex]

The point I think he's trying to make is that our economic system, to a greater degree than many of us want to recognize, hands out rewards arbitrarily. Merit alone will not get you there: luck and family connections (which is basically another form of luck) help a great deal more.

I think a reason we find this so disagreeable to think about is that it removes much of the incentive to work hard. If you are not wealthy and you don't work hard, you have a basically 0% chance of achieving wealth. If you do work hard, you have a 5% chance (for example). So, sure, if you want fiscal security then you have to work very hard, but even with hard work success is unlikely, with the factors other than "work hard" largely out of your control.

Then, of course, if you do achieve success it's easy to attribute it solely to your hard work (after all, again, if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't have been successful) - which is supremely annoying to everyone else as it very obviously isn't the case.

[exe34]

> Rich people never understand that most of their success came from luck.

Is it really important if they understand it? Isn't enough for everybody else to know that?