7 ms·

Given how much of success is luck, I try and play a game whenever I see successful people asked "how to be successful" where I try and 'spot the overfitting.' I

by cwyers 10y ago

Given how much of success is luck, I try and play a game whenever I see successful people asked "how to be successful" where I try and 'spot the overfitting.' Is this really what made you successful? Or is this just what you wanted to do, and because you were successful, you think it has to be why you succeeded because of course your success was earned?

WalterBright 10y ago
When the odds of success are favorable if you keep playing, eventually you will win, even if each individual event is luck. For example, is it luck that the Vegas casinos make money on gambling? Nope, even though the outcome of each individual hand is luck. Many people who are successful went through repeated failures to get there. They never gave up.
- ouid 10y ago
  if you interview lottery winners, you're not going to get very good advice.
  - jinjin2 10y ago
    No, but if you interview casino owners (people who make decisions that means they regularly get a lucky outcome, even if they don't win all the time), you will probably get pretty good advice.
    - ouid 10y ago
      casino owners compete with each other. Lots of casinos fail, but you don't get interviews with failed casino owners. (edit: I just realized that there is one, very notable exception to this) If the only difference between a successful casino strategy and an unsuccessful one is failure to control for some variable, then the variance in that variable will yield some very successful casinos, and some unsuccessful casinos, regardless of the actual expected value of the casino business.
      - wsinks 10y ago
        I'VE GOT THE BEST CASINOS - THEY'RE TREMENDOUS. That kind of notable exception?
- FfejL 10y ago
  I find that a very weak analogy. The house wins in Vegas over the long haul because the odds have been tilted in their favor. Any one hand of blackjack is luck, but the house winning over the course of a million is a mathematically certainty. It has nothing to do with 'not giving up.' What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor? Perhaps more to the point, Amazon was the first company Bezos founded. MicroSoft was Gates' first, and Michael Dell founded Dell while still at school. In what sense did these men go through repeated failures? That's not to say these aren't exceptional men. Of course they are. But luck played a huge role in their success.
  - jinjin2 10y ago
    > What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor? Becoming a billionaire will rarely be the result of one lucky decision, but rather the result of thousands of individual decision where a larger than average number of them turn out to be "lucky". I would think that the way to tilt the odds in your favor would be to study and listen to those who have successfully done this, and see if you can get some hints to how they made all these decisions.
    - cwyers 10y ago
      But you can't just study what the successful people have done, you have to study what actually makes them different from everyone else. Think of it as a Type I error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors Let's say you interview 10 billionaires and 9 say they did X. Does X increase the likelihood of being a billionaire? You don't know until you look at the entire population of people TRYING to be billionaires. If X occurs in 90% of the billionaire population but 99% of the non-billionaire strivers population, then what you conclude is that in fact NOT doing X makes you more likely to succeed.* You can't study what makes you successful without including people who aren't successful. * Yes I know that the difference between 90% and 99% is hard if not impossible to measure in a sample of 10.
      - 10y ago
- runeks 10y ago
  I share your view on luck. It's possible to position oneself such that a profit is made on a lucky event. One such event occurring is luck, but the positioning -- in order to profit if the event happens -- has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with skill.
sshumaker 10y ago
Moderate success is usually earned: hard work + talent. Breakout success typically requires a lot of luck on top of everything else. The difference between a successful career and that billion dollar exit mostly comes down to timing.
- cvtucvtuq 10y ago
  but has anyone ever actually work out the stats for this ? Do we really know the (hardwork+IQ+talent)/luck ratio for the top 20 most successful business leaders ? Who's examined the other universes where Bezos made all the same decisions but had bad luck ? It seems like this whole area reeks of astrology.
jeffdavis 10y ago
I'm not sure what to do with your insight. Should we not listen to successful people's advice? Should we listen, but be more skeptical?
- cwyers 10y ago
  So, there's signal and then there's noise, right? Successful people do know things about success. But they have various biases -- hindsight bias, selection bias, etc. -- that add noise to what they know. So yeah, "listen, but be more skeptical" I think is the right approach. And one thing I think (but I could be wrong!) is a thing to listen for is successful people who acknowledge their good fortune. It speaks to a self-awareness that suggests they may understand their success more than someone who isn't aware of their biases.
- consz 10y ago
  I would say, yes -- "do not, or heavily discount, all successful people's advice" -- is advice that is life +EV. Most successful people are not statisticians, nor drawing their conclusion from a sample larger than, say, themselves and perhaps the few successful friends closest to them, when giving the sort of advice in the OP. Moreover, given how easily humans tend to conflate "What did successful people do?" with "What did successful people compared to the set of people who tried to be successful?", the risk of bad advice is even larger. At best, you're hearing white noise, but more than likely, you're hearing a case of survivorship bias (even worse than white noise).
bordercases 10y ago
Meh. Positive exposure is a choice. Knowing how to create that exposure, is a choice. If there is an application of effort at an opportune time, such that one is successful, that still necessitates the effort. Admittedly in the startup world and the early days of computing this was probably more true, that factors outside of your control influenced your success. It happened to be the case that computers were something people wanted to invest in, even though some random hacker in his garage was just doing it for fun. The volatility plus the hype exaggerated any effort that was put into the game in the first place, thus making the coupling between effort and success seem discontinuous. But a human still had to motivate themselves to build the thing. "How did my actions create positive exposure and how did I capitalize on things that appeared to me?" would be the operative questions here, not "what was the sequence of actions I controlled the world with?"
golergka 10y ago
I don't think you can write Bezos off via survivor bias. Amazon has a track record of success in different industries; it's reasonable to assume that the man in charge isn't just randomly lucky.
upquark 10y ago
How much of success is luck? I honestly don't know. It feels like another feel-good mantra coming out of SV culture. Most successful people I know or have heard of do not fit the profile of an average Joe (including qualities that are pre-set at birth and cannot change with success).

by cwyers 10y ago

WalterBright 10y ago

When the odds of success are favorable if you keep playing, eventually you will win, even if each individual event is luck. For example, is it luck that the Vegas casinos make money on gambling? Nope, even though the outcome of each individual hand is luck. Many people who are successful went through repeated failures to get there. They never gave up.

ouid 10y ago
if you interview lottery winners, you're not going to get very good advice.
- jinjin2 10y ago
  No, but if you interview casino owners (people who make decisions that means they regularly get a lucky outcome, even if they don't win all the time), you will probably get pretty good advice.
  - ouid 10y ago
    casino owners compete with each other. Lots of casinos fail, but you don't get interviews with failed casino owners. (edit: I just realized that there is one, very notable exception to this) If the only difference between a successful casino strategy and an unsuccessful one is failure to control for some variable, then the variance in that variable will yield some very successful casinos, and some unsuccessful casinos, regardless of the actual expected value of the casino business.
    - wsinks 10y ago
      I'VE GOT THE BEST CASINOS - THEY'RE TREMENDOUS. That kind of notable exception?
FfejL 10y ago
I find that a very weak analogy. The house wins in Vegas over the long haul because the odds have been tilted in their favor. Any one hand of blackjack is luck, but the house winning over the course of a million is a mathematically certainty. It has nothing to do with 'not giving up.' What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor? Perhaps more to the point, Amazon was the first company Bezos founded. MicroSoft was Gates' first, and Michael Dell founded Dell while still at school. In what sense did these men go through repeated failures? That's not to say these aren't exceptional men. Of course they are. But luck played a huge role in their success.
- jinjin2 10y ago
  > What are the odds of becoming a billionaire? And how does someone tilt those odds in their favor? Becoming a billionaire will rarely be the result of one lucky decision, but rather the result of thousands of individual decision where a larger than average number of them turn out to be "lucky". I would think that the way to tilt the odds in your favor would be to study and listen to those who have successfully done this, and see if you can get some hints to how they made all these decisions.
  - cwyers 10y ago
    But you can't just study what the successful people have done, you have to study what actually makes them different from everyone else. Think of it as a Type I error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors Let's say you interview 10 billionaires and 9 say they did X. Does X increase the likelihood of being a billionaire? You don't know until you look at the entire population of people TRYING to be billionaires. If X occurs in 90% of the billionaire population but 99% of the non-billionaire strivers population, then what you conclude is that in fact NOT doing X makes you more likely to succeed.* You can't study what makes you successful without including people who aren't successful. * Yes I know that the difference between 90% and 99% is hard if not impossible to measure in a sample of 10.
    - 10y ago
runeks 10y ago
I share your view on luck. It's possible to position oneself such that a profit is made on a lucky event. One such event occurring is luck, but the positioning -- in order to profit if the event happens -- has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with skill.

sshumaker 10y ago

Moderate success is usually earned: hard work + talent. Breakout success typically requires a lot of luck on top of everything else. The difference between a successful career and that billion dollar exit mostly comes down to timing.

cvtucvtuq 10y ago
but has anyone ever actually work out the stats for this ? Do we really know the (hardwork+IQ+talent)/luck ratio for the top 20 most successful business leaders ? Who's examined the other universes where Bezos made all the same decisions but had bad luck ? It seems like this whole area reeks of astrology.

jeffdavis 10y ago

I'm not sure what to do with your insight. Should we not listen to successful people's advice? Should we listen, but be more skeptical?

cwyers 10y ago
So, there's signal and then there's noise, right? Successful people do know things about success. But they have various biases -- hindsight bias, selection bias, etc. -- that add noise to what they know. So yeah, "listen, but be more skeptical" I think is the right approach. And one thing I think (but I could be wrong!) is a thing to listen for is successful people who acknowledge their good fortune. It speaks to a self-awareness that suggests they may understand their success more than someone who isn't aware of their biases.
consz 10y ago
I would say, yes -- "do not, or heavily discount, all successful people's advice" -- is advice that is life +EV. Most successful people are not statisticians, nor drawing their conclusion from a sample larger than, say, themselves and perhaps the few successful friends closest to them, when giving the sort of advice in the OP. Moreover, given how easily humans tend to conflate "What did successful people do?" with "What did successful people compared to the set of people who tried to be successful?", the risk of bad advice is even larger. At best, you're hearing white noise, but more than likely, you're hearing a case of survivorship bias (even worse than white noise).

bordercases 10y ago

Meh. Positive exposure is a choice. Knowing how to create that exposure, is a choice. If there is an application of effort at an opportune time, such that one is successful, that still necessitates the effort. Admittedly in the startup world and the early days of computing this was probably more true, that factors outside of your control influenced your success. It happened to be the case that computers were something people wanted to invest in, even though some random hacker in his garage was just doing it for fun. The volatility plus the hype exaggerated any effort that was put into the game in the first place, thus making the coupling between effort and success seem discontinuous. But a human still had to motivate themselves to build the thing. "How did my actions create positive exposure and how did I capitalize on things that appeared to me?" would be the operative questions here, not "what was the sequence of actions I controlled the world with?"

golergka 10y ago

I don't think you can write Bezos off via survivor bias. Amazon has a track record of success in different industries; it's reasonable to assume that the man in charge isn't just randomly lucky.

upquark 10y ago

How much of success is luck? I honestly don't know. It feels like another feel-good mantra coming out of SV culture. Most successful people I know or have heard of do not fit the profile of an average Joe (including qualities that are pre-set at birth and cannot change with success).