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by bentocorp 635 days ago
To be successful you don't really need to be clever and you don't need to be brave.

You need to get lucky, and if that doesn't work, then yes persistence is the next most important thing – keep trying until you do get lucky.

1 comments

My favorite aphorism about luck is that you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

After becoming adults, luck rarely falls into our laps. We have to make decisions that make us lucky.

Through that lens, bravery is the will to buy a ticket. Many people don’t. Cleverness is the quality of the ticket, since they have different probabilities of success. And persistence is the decision to keep playing the game, even after you’ve lost every other.

So I think the three qualities are aligned with the view that success is just another word for luck.

> you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket

you can expect to win if you buy a ticket every week for the next 6 million years

That's funny but given the normal result of buying a lottery ticket, bravery == stupidity.
Exactly, foolishness is bravery without cleverness