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> while you point to your record of actual accomplishments and proclaim your mediocrity Luck being the missing ingredient.

• eli_gottlieb 9y ago
  No, not at all. The missing ingredients are drive from an early age, extreme privilege from almost birth, and/or efficiency of work-ethic from an early age. You can crank things out by putting in a lot of hours, to work towards a goal, but that's not actually enough. You needed to learn how to just process things efficiently and mechanically from the start. You shouldn't have grown a sense of drive at age 23 and then needed to figure out how that works. You should have been efficient since forever, and then been able to deploy that towards drive at whatever age. Ideally, you should have had drive starting around age 14 on top of efficiency. Provided you never managed any of those things, you should have just been born right. It's easy to hit all the top-ranked targets in life without having efficiency, or even an idea or drive before adulthood -- provided someone sent you to prep school, put you through top universities, and let you know you could start a business without worrying about ever starving or missing rent. (I've met some people as privileged as that last description. The best among them is absolutely one of the most friendly, helpful, overall nice people I've ever met. Many of them are self-aware about the whole thing. Those who are neither nice nor self-aware are a danger to society, and IMHO haven't really earned it. Oh, and worse, some of the non-nice, self-unaware ones are in some very, very high places. Apparently they're awkward at parties, too.)