[AmericanChopper]

The idea that success is earned through luck rather than merit is a firmly ideological position, regardless of the domain you’re talking about. If you succeeded via luck then that provides a better moral justification for the related ideological position that you should be deprived of the fruits of your labor as much as possible, for redistribution to others who were simply less lucky than you. It’s really just sour grapes.

The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume. It’s not 0 variance, but if you have some insight into what people want, and you do the work to execute your idea, then you can simply work through the ups and downs and success is almost inevitable.

[somenameforme]

One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias. [1]

No he didn't immediately received the same level of reception and success as Stephen King does, but neither did Stephen King at first! That's why it's skill + dedication. If you look at some of the old videos of people who have succeeded in e.g. social media, they tend to have terrible production quality yet still significantly stand out from the crowd, even their early days. For instance this [2] is one of the first videos Vertasium ever uploaded, 13 years old now! That video, even now still 'only' has 230k views, and certainly had a tiny fraction of that when it was initially released - but he kept at it, clearly putting way more into his videos than he was getting out of them - until that trend reversed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBjZz0iQrzI

[jcranmer]

> One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias.

I don't think it actually demonstrates this. As your wording hints, the hard part of writing is getting yourself out of the slush pile and into an editor and publisher's hands, and Stephen King's actions relied on his existing relationship with said editor and publisher to publish under a different name. He never demonstrated pulling the feat of escaping the slush pile again.

In modern content creation, the similar metric is getting to, say, 1k views, or even as prosaically simple as being part of the 50% of streamers to get 1 view. It's not sufficient to have talent to get to even that level of success; there is a lot of luck necessary to get you there.

[nemothekid]

The mistake you (and a lot of others are making) is that the people who didn’t make it just weren’t skilled enough.

That isn’t true - I think the people who don’t make it are massively skilled. It’s not random in the sense it’s just selecting randomly from the population. It’s random in the sense that there are 100 elite content producers but at any given moment there is only space for 10 of them.

Stephen King has a massive leg up for already having built the inroads for having a successful book. I think if you give any elite, yet unknown writer, the same tools, editor, and publisher they would succeed. But to truly succeed from nothing may just depend on going to school with someone who became an editor, or the editor’s daughter showing them a TikTok. That’s what is meant by it’s largely random.

[darby_nine]

> The formula for success in any field is simply to make a product that other people want to consume

Well, the formula for success in selling products is this. Most people don't define success in terms of business acumen.

Except, of course, businessmen. If you perceive our society as centered around successful people, of course you'll see it as merit-based. If you perceive our society as poorly run and catering to the rich, of course you'll see success as primarily a product of circumstance outside of your control. Is it so hard to see that "merit" is necessarily defined in subjective terms?

[AmericanChopper]

This is just arguing over phrasing. It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, if you’re making YouTube videos, or music, or paintings, or cakes, or web apps, or cleaning diveways, your ability to succeed boils down to your ability to provide something other people want. That is the objective source of your merit.

Perhaps your own idea of success in life is something that revolves exclusively around your own satisfaction, like going off and living in the woods. But this is exactly the same situation, you’re just only trying to provide the things that one person wants in that scenario, yourself. Your ability to do this will again come down to your own merit.

Of course if you’re chronically frustrated by being less successful than you would like to be, then looking for alternative explanations such as luck will be an attractive scapegoat that could excuse you from scrutinising your own capabilities. But the human inclination towards doing that is certainly not morally righteous.

[SunlightEdge]

I don't think its black and white. I think sometimes success is a matter of luck. For example, in large organizations there can be a lot of roles generated where there isn't always that much direct pressure and people can be hired through luck (e.g. getting on with the boss, some types of diversity hires, being loyal to a company even if you are not that good etc.). If teams of people make products/reports etc. sometimes it can be hard to shine, and 'talkers' who don't contribute much can get promoted into a 'lucky' role. Its not black and white.

[AmericanChopper]

You illustrate a perfect example of simply not understanding what people want. Talkers get promoted because talkers have social skills, and companies are social systems, and social skills are required to advance through them. Social skills are probably more desirable than technical skills most of the time. It’s not luck that these people succeed, it’s the fact that they have the qualities that people want.

You can succeed through partially through luck, like if a record executive decides they going to manufacture some massive level of fame for you. But this isn’t a viable long term strategy, only providing what people want is. Over time the variance of luck goes away. The luck outlook relies on the fallacious idea that you only get one opportunity to succeed, but you don’t, you have as long as you’re willing to keep trying. Maybe a failure on one particular day can be explained by luck, but you get to wake up and keep trying every day, and if you have what people want then luck becomes irrelevant and eventually you will succeed. That’s how basically every single successful person you’ve ever heard of has done it.