[fearless]

When you say something is "the ugly truth", you're presenting it as fact, not opinion. I don't mean to be rude, but the prevailing attitude on HN of "successful people are successful because they got lucky" is poisonous to say the least.

[Udo]

I'm not asserting that all successful people are that way because of luck, but those two examples are certainly valid in that sense. The citations can be found all over the place, including Wikipedia. That doesn't mean those people didn't have talent. I'm simply stating that they could get by without changing their style because their success predated their need to get along with people.

A lot of extremely successful people got there because of extreme luck. Their extreme luck became an essential component of their success. It's not that they won a planetwide lottery without doing anything for it. It's that they won the lottery and were very competent, and in some cases, hard working. Again, please note that I'm talking about the extremely successful people that we like to iconize.

To be phenomenally successful you typically are extremely young, come from a reasonably affluent background, have enjoyed a very nice education, and your early life is characterized by crossing paths with lots of influential rich people. Contrast that with "normally" successful people, they are just different. They can be any age, come from a variety of backgrounds, and typically they had to deal with (and improve on) a longer streak of rejections.

I don't think it's poisonous to acknowledge luck, it is one of the necessary ingredients of extreme success. And extreme success is usually a necessary ingredient for trend-setting the styles and mannerisms we have come to expect from all successful founders.