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> That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got

> That level of wealth and success relative to others can only possibly be achieved by luck I bet if you were sitting next to Gates in the 80s and 90s and got to see how many decisions he had to make to achieve what we did, I'd doubt you'd it attribute it solely to luck. All successful businesses likely experience some form of luck, but you need to be in a position to take advantage of it and that comes from skill and hard work. I think people underestimate how difficult it is to create an industry like PCs or business software. After they're ubiquitous it's easy to look back and say "well of course, anyone could have done that", but the fact is other's were trying and failed or gave up or never started.

mreome 8y ago
I'm in no way attributing his achievements solely to luck. You say there were those who "were trying and failed" and those "gave up or never started." He had to have the skills and perseverance to not be in the last group, and the skills to make the choices that didn't lead to early failures. But there is a point at which the compounding effects of luck separates the successful from the ridiculously successful. If you re-rolled all the dice that defined the random chances and situational conditions in his life, I'd expect someone like Gates to come out reasonably successful in many cases. But he had to get one very specific set of roles to be where he is now, you'd have to re-roll forever for that set to come up again. And It's not unreasonable to think that there are a fair number of people out there who could achieve the same ridiculous level of success if you re-rolled their dice enough times.