12 ms·

Hypothesis: the "people who get stuff done" are a subset of a larger group with the same personality and talents, but without as much luck. Those other people

• scarejunba 8y ago
  Possibly true but doesn't affect the outcome. If you can do some things to increase the likelihood of success with low cost, the fact that success is dominated by things you can't change doesn't matter. There are no guarantees, only actions that mildly bias one outcome over another.
  • hyperpape 8y ago
    Why think the cost is low? I suspect there are a lot of people with founder type personalities who have wasted tons of money, time and goodwill chasing their ambition.
    • JetSpiegel 8y ago
      Those people are losers, so the message never comes out, ensuring survivorship bias.
    • nostrademons 8y ago
      If you exhibit the cognitive distortions in the slideshow, this likely doesn't matter to you. Money, time, and goodwill are all meaningless if you don't achieve your ambition, per all 5 of them.
      • hyperpape 8y ago
        Just because you exhibit that distortion doesn't mean it's true! You might be less happy, even if you consciously think that the only thing that matters is chasing your ambition.
        • nostrademons 8y ago
          When it comes to happiness, there's no such thing as "true" outside of your own cognitive perceptions. I mean, what would that even look like? Your own happiness is just an emotion happening inside your head; how could any other person, without access to your head, tell you that you're "wrong" in perceiving that? Now, it's possible for someone's actions to suggest that they have some subconscious motivations that are in conflict with what they say makes them happy. And it's also possible for them to grow in ways that overcome these cognitive distortions, such that chasing an ambition over all else is no longer fulfilling for them. But even if that happens, in the moments before growth they still were not losing out on anything, because their psyche at the time didn't care about what they missed out on.
          • hyperpape 8y ago
            > Your own happiness is just an emotion happening inside your head; how could any other person, without access to your head, tell you that you're "wrong" in perceiving that? Saying happiness is a kind of mental state doesn't mean that you're guaranteed to be right about whether you're in it. People are constantly in denial about whether they're jealous, depressed, angry, etc. Happiness is the same thing. We all undergo some mix of positive and negative experiences in our life. We come to a conclusion about whether those add up to happiness, and that conclusion is colored by many things, like the idea that we're fulfilling some important purpose, or "crushing it" or whatever else. As for your point about "who can tell you you're not happy", that's missing the point. It's true that someone else who is not privy to your stream of consciousness probably isn't in a position to tell you whether you're happy. But that in no way implies that your own judgment is infallible. Nothing about the world guarantees that every truth is knowable by someone, at least not easily. It may be that you're blind to your own mental state. However, we have very good evidence in aggregate that many people chase success at the expense of happiness. They often later describe a feeling that they were deceiving themselves.
  • GW150914 8y ago
    Except, does it bias the outcome at all? If you do a meta study of a thousand different medications that work, you’d discover the single most common ingredients are starch or cellulose. Clearly it’s worth taking either or both to stay healthy! Of course this ignores the fact that they’re just filler, the active ingredients are the tiny fraction of the total recipe that are actually pharmacologically active. The presence of a trait doesn’t imply that it’s in any way an active ingredient, even a very little active. Post hoc analysis is bullshit.
    • scarejunba 8y ago
      Well if you were entrepreneur-material you would have been able to extrapolate off the limited information ;P
    • atomical 8y ago
      Medications are indicated for disease. Only pseudoscientists take drugs for health.
      • GW150914 8y ago
        Statins? Hypertensive meditations? Anxiolytics? Prophylaxis in general?
        • atomical 8y ago
          Are those not addressing states of disease?
          • GW150914 8y ago
            They can be used to treat disease, but are often used to prevent disease. Statins in particular are used to prevent cardiovascular disease from developing.
            • atomical 8y ago
              If someone has high cholesterol don't they already have the beginnings of disease? Are there people taking statins with zero plaque in their arteries?
• adnzzzzZ 8y ago
  Stop using luck as an excuse for your failures and other people's failures. https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/issues/38 https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/issues/38
  • eeeuo 8y ago
    To outright dismiss the possibility of chance affecting people's lives for a cute one-liner is pretty silly.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • cncrnd 8y ago
      To summarize, the link says that luck is real but you are better off thinking that it isn't real since that will affect your behavior in a more positive way. Still not sure I agree in this case (you can think luck is real bit still behave optimally) but it could be a helpful way to think in other scenarios.
      • adnzzzzZ 8y ago
        It's not about correct in one scenario or another, it's about having a low resolution view of the world that will be helpful. As the PDF states, https://vgy.me/C7hfiH.png https://vgy.me/C7hfiH.png, "cognitive distortions are filters or lenses that influence thinking, shape interpretation of reality, basis for action". Truly convincing yourself that luck isn't relevant is one such cognitive distortion that is a very helpful way of guiding your actions through life. Once you get into any specific situation and you need a higher resolution view of things then you can look at the situation as it should be looked rather than defaulting to the low resolution view that luck doesn't matter.
        • cncrnd 8y ago
          I know what it's saying, but I don't agree that 'convincing yourself that luck isn't relevant is one such cognitive distortion that is a very helpful way of guiding your actions through life.' We can all put our big boy pants on, accept that luck is a part of reality, and act in the best possible way with this fact in consideration.
• kebman 8y ago
  Examples of luck: - Being born into a good family. - Winning the lottery. Luck: Something you cannot affect yourself. If luck is your only game, prepare to be disappointed. Also: 70 percent of lottery winners, end up broke just a few years later. Question: Is having good luck actually bad luck? Or does it trigger bad behaviours that rich people don't have? ... I think this well and truly debunks any notion that luck's got anything to do with it. In fact I think the opposite. I think luck's got nothing to to with it, and that the only way you will keep your wealth, is to learn how to 1. increase it fast, and 2. how to hold on to it. As a matter of fact, most people live from hand to mouth. They aren't even able to hold on to the little wealth they create. And thus so many of them think they're slaves, when they are in fact free to do as they like. Thing is, most people are terribly afraid of the freedom, and – as the example with the lottery winners prove – most can't handle large sums of money anyway. If you want an example of a guy who really learned about money before he got rich, look up Elon Musk. One of the reasons he dared to risk everything, was because he learned to live on much less than normal people would ever accept. He knows his bare minimum. Do you? With that security securely at the bottom, he could risk the venture that starting a new company from scratch is. In any case, luck's got nothing to do with it.
  • jf- 8y ago
    That’s a rather simplistic notion of luck. The success or failure of any new business is largely up to luck, simply due to the number of unknowns: market demand, marketing strategy, economic conditions, access to resources, access to talent. It is also not a fact that if you build a perfect, shining example of the thing you had in mind that it’s automatically successful. And people aren’t ‘terribly afraid of freedom’, what does that even mean?
    • hueving 8y ago
      Other than a change in 'economic conditions', the rest of those issues can be avoided with adequate business research. Just because most technologists don't doesn't mean it's actually such an unknown.
      • 8y ago
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  People are endlessly fascinated with the piece of success that we might have some hope of exercising control over. It gives people something constructive to try to work on. This is generally better than hating your life and buying lottery tickets while not bothering to work towards anything. There are a great many things beyond our control. But we will never stop trying to figure out that one thing we can do by choice that makes some kind of difference -- the more difference, the better.
  • projektir 8y ago
    > People are endlessly fascinated with the piece of success that we might have some hope of exercising control over. It gives people something constructive to try to work on. This is generally better than hating your life and buying lottery tickets while not bothering to work towards anything. Except there's a lot more going on here and a lot more at stake. Beliefs about the world, specifically beliefs about, long story short, why bad things happen to good people, can dramatically affect policy decisions and what a given culture considers acceptable. Someone feeling good about themselves is absolutely not a good enough reason to mangle reality. And that seems to be all that this whole mess is about. You want to believe you are in control of your life so you bury everyone else with you when that's absolutely not what we need right now to actually understand why things happen. Rejection of the influence of randomness means we do not examine or account for said randomness. It means we think safety nets are worthless. It means we vote against free healthcare. It means we leave people to fend for themselves because we convince ourselves that it logically makes sense. If people control everything and if their determination is all they need, then we do not need to help them. For a large slew of events that can randomly hit a person, there is often a very non-random source. But we are so focused on an individual-based rhetoric that we cannot admit that sometimes people affect others and that is a much bigger lever to pull than trying to convince every individual person to be some sort of a superhero who has no problems.
    • DoreenMichele 8y ago
      Your remarks in no way fit with anything I am trying to communicate.
• projektir 8y ago
  This is sports and really any competitive zero-sum area in a nutshell. To be in it you have to have an inflated sense of your possibility of success, but to have said success you nonetheless have to be in it, so anyone who makes it is going to be a person with somewhat unrealistic reasoning, but since there's no feedback loop they never get the message that their reasoning was unrealistic.
• winrid 8y ago
  No luck. They are more disciplined and make themselves more valuable. If these unlucky people you describe win the power ball they'll just lose it because they failed to become millionaires (discipline/money management) before they got the millions.
• SZJX 8y ago
  Exactly. People tend to worship personalities all-in just because they are successful. However it might well be the case that they're successful despite their personality issues, instead of "because of" them. When I was reading Peter Thiel's startup notes I kept thinking: He is successful, but it doesn't mean many of his thoughts make much sense or are actually applicable. Maybe he just succeeded despite holding some wrong beliefs. I would hypothesize that some founders succeeded despite being jerks, but most jerks are not successful founders, and most successful founders aren't jerks. In any case, if somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. However if one goes as far as really to "distort" the reality/self perception, I don't think it can end well at all and might well wreck havoc and can even be classic signs of depression. Objectively evaluating evidence, understanding that human beings are not fundamentally different, genuinely listening to others and immediately acknowledging own folly can only be a plus in all sorts of scenarios.