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Success: effort or luck? — Discover how succesful people reach the top
You could work as hard as you wanted and still not be successful. And it’s not an opinion — it’s math. An interactive experiment to explore how and why the most successful people really reach the top – and why most stay mediocre.
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Max Prilutskiy
Launching soon!
Very nice! 👍
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Hi Product Hunters! 👋
Great to be back once again, this time with a more experimental thing to launch.
This is something I made in just a few days after an idea got so stuck in my mind I had to build the thing.
Here's the whole story behind this experiment 👉 https://twitter.com/rameerez/sta...
It's about the whole idea of randomness (and luck) in life.
Some time ago I had an interesting conversation with a successful friend of mine. They argued that a lot of their current efforts are geared towards proving their success has been the result of skill and hard work, and not luck alone. The sad truth is they probably can't. One can't just decouple success from luck – and even if one could, it's not self-evident that the contribution of luck can be thought of as negligible.
Even though luck only accounts for a small proportion of success, it's still extremely critical.
Everyone (me included, ofc) wants to think they're in control of their own lives. Assuming we're just spectators at the mercy of randomness is a bleak and devastating idea. If there's nothing we can do – why bother doing anything in the first place?
If hard work doesn't make us special and extraordinary, if we're just dependent on luck for our lives' success, then we're just a product of entropy and successful people are just randomly selected individuals. It could have been the way it went down – or it could have been the completely opposite way, with almost equal probability. Your success could have just been others' at the flip of a coin.
There's hope, though. Reality is much more complicated than this, and hard work still accounts for the most part of success. This is not a nihilistic message aimed to get people depressed – but rather a thought experiment to reflect about the whole idea of randomness in this world and maybe help spark a few interesting conversations with friends.
Are we really going to leave out the "mommy and daddy are rich" variable in this equation?
@aulig Thank you! Yes, I first heard the idea through a friend (whole story here https://twitter.com/rameerez/sta...) but he then sent me this video as his source! Definitely a very interesting topic to explore!