3 ms·
Life is not a lottery. EDIT: Statements like "survival bias" are used by people that often subscribe to Narrative Fallacies. Companies like GOOG, FACE, APPL
by max_ 9y ago
Life is not a lottery.
EDIT:
Statements like "survival bias" are used by people that often subscribe to Narrative Fallacies.
Companies like GOOG, FACE, APPL, MSFT are not successful because they won some big lottery.
They are successful because the identified "objectives"
and made the right calculations to those objectives.
And if they stop making the right calculations to their ojectives they WILL end up like Kodak, Nokia & HP
- tyingq 9y agoYou don't think some amount of luck is involved? I believe most of your example successes had moments where they avoided failure only via outside factors they didn't predict, control, etc.
- max_ 9y ago"Luck" strikes every-one once in a while. What matters is whether you are ready or not. To make use of your "Luck"
- tyingq 9y agoI don't feel like that's the case every time. Sometimes you make the right decision for the wrong reasons. Or your bad decisions, by way of luck, end up not hurting you. Bill Gates, for example, initially declined IBM's approaches to build DOS for them. He declined, and referred them to Gary Kildall. IBM only came back to Gates because the deal with Kildall fell apart. There was no vision, skill, etc, in that sequence of events. Just luck. I imagine other highly successful people could point out similar stories in their past. Gates likely would have been successful either way, but perhaps not to the same degree.
- taneq 9y agoWhat's that saying, again? "Luck is where preparation meets opportunity"?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- qznc 9y agoThe made the right calculation with insufficient data, which means they were guessing. They guessed correctly and survived. Other guessed incorrectly and disappeared. I do not see a difference to a lottery.
- max_ 9y agoIts not like they were rolling the dice. Or shuffling cards. They were more swift in executions, standing up to "conventional" wisdom, and persevering when others were running away.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoShuffling cards might not be a bad analogy, actually. There's a lot of skill involved in high-level poker play, but there's only so much you can do with a series of bad hands.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoYou're offended because you think that people are discounting the very real brilliance and hard work behind these success stories. It's true that none of these folks would be where they are if they weren't smart and dedicated. But there are millions of smart, dedicated failures and mediocrities in the world. Brilliance and hard work are necessary but not sufficient, and the other ingredient is, yes, luck.
- wpietri 9y ago> They are successful because the identified "objectives" and made the right calculations to those objectives. This is pretty close to tautological. Your version of "right" can only be evaluated decades after the fact. Who succeeded? The ones who were right. Who's right? The ones who succeeded. I also think it highly overvalues making the right calculations. All the calculation in the world will not avail you if you are not in the right position to make it happen. In human history, there have been about 100 billion people. How many of them, even given the right ideas, were placed to build a company like Apple or Google? Even if we focus on ideas alone, making all the right calculations isn't sufficient. Somebody else could do that, too, and then it does come down to circumstance and luck. It's certainly uncomfortable that life is hugely random. But I don't think the solution is to try to sweep that under the rug. If nothing else, that sort of aversion to risk keeps us from making good calculations about business.