Agree with all your points except the private military part... One day I'm going to write about the many ways by which people conflate joint, conditional proba

Agree with all your points except the private military part... One day I'm going to write about the many ways by which people conflate joint, conditional probability and probability spaces... It is true that the chance of a random individual to become a billionaire is extremely small but at any given point a particular individual is conditioned in a particular set of events that make it more or less likely. The chance of flipping 8 heads in a row is 0.39% but given you have already flipped 7 heads the chance is now 50%. The space for becoming successful is not directly predicated on the number of people attempting to or have already become successful, it is predicated on a whole set of traits, events and actions out of and in your control. Your chance in succeeding is not 1% or some other stupid number, it is an unknown quantity conditioned on your circumstances. By tweaking those in your control you can increase you chance of success to a higher (or lower) number. As you state, to become a billionaire for the sake of having some power of 10 of an abstract quantity tied to your name is a pretty empty way of life. Not to mention the justification for such a disproportionate distribution of wealth (unless you can argue that such an allocation allows a more efficient redistribution than otherwise, rarely the case) is frankly, unnecessary and possibly detrimental. Anyways, seems to me that the solution is to have your definition of success be more meaningful than an arbitrary number and to realize that at any given point there are a set of goals that are more realizable than others, picking those which maximize some short term p(success) which also taking you closest to your long term definition of success is all it takes. It is the journey and not the destination that is important. With constant engagement, feeling of moving forward and a wholesome but necessarily subjective notion of value then at any time you will be successful while at the same time becoming more successful. This to me seems to be pretty obvious and I have seen this advice in multiple forms in many places. Yet the original post and many others suggest this is not commonly held sense. This I do not understand.