[malthaus]

because most people have something called life experience or come from a culture not brainwashed by the american dream. of course YOU can do anything, but whether you are successful with that or not is up to a million factors you cannot control, no matter how much of your all you give.

go to a casino, throw your life savings on one number. if you win, tell everyone how you gave it all and you manifested it by pure will. if you lose, nobody will ever hear from it.

in addition, pg is so heavily biased on this and should never be taken as gospel.

[gizmo]

The belief that luck is the dominant factor in success is false and harmful to the extent that it keeps people from trying. I mean trying for real as opposed to giving up after a bunch of setbacks.

[antisthenes]

Yeah, those pesky setbacks like getting injured, working yourself to death and running out of money so you can't feed yourself.

If only people tried for real.

In my experience people most likely to write this are trust fund babies who neglect to mention they're getting essentially a stipend from their parents to take care of all their life necessities, so they can "try for real". Whatever that means.

[gizmo]

What I have seen is that people who don't quit eventually become pretty successful. Some people have to quit because of health reasons or other unfortunate circumstances. But in the overwhelming majority of cases people just get demoralized.

20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I don't.

[antisthenes]

> 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but today I don't.

On that point, I'll agree with you. 20 years ago I would have said you're flat out wrong, but today, I'd say you have a valid point in that too many people give up after the first few failures (or never even try enough to get to a failure point)