| I think you have your statistical inference backwards. > By that same logic you can conclude that eating food leads to becoming one of the greats, because they all ate food. No your logic is wrong. The data you have is that "All people who are successful eat food." That does not imply that "If you eat food, you will be successful." But it does imply "If you do not eat food, you will not be successful." And that's certainly a true fact. Starving to death and being dead is not a viable path to success, or at least not any kind of success you will be around to experience. If you see that all people in category X have a certain property Y, that's good data that you'll need to have Y before you can be an X. But it does not imply that having Y will make you an X. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition. To the original point, it seems that nearly all successful people have to make some difficult sacrifices to get there. So, yes, you probably will also have to make difficult sacrifices to be successful. But even so, that's no guarantee of success. It's just that not making any sacrifices is a guarantee of not being successful. I'm ignoring, of course, that "success" is highly subjective and individually determined. But certainly when it comes to marathon runners, you won't find any successful ones that didn't have to make real sacrifices to get there. Long distance running is hard. |