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Honestly, I'd say in quite a few fields, talent and hard work aren't even the cost of entry, they're semi irrelevant to how well someone does there. Sports is o
by CM30 7y ago
Honestly, I'd say in quite a few fields, talent and hard work aren't even the cost of entry, they're semi irrelevant to how well someone does there. Sports is one of those cases where being extremely good at something is directly correlated to success, and there's no way around that.
And even that's got a certain element of opportunity in terms of the era you were born in. Tons of good athletes could have revolutionised their fields had they been born a few decades/centuries earlier. See British tennis pros, with the likes of Henman and Murray having had the potential to win a lot more grand slams in an era with worse rivals.
Still, other fields are a lot more opportunity and luck based. A lot of successful businesspeople got there by being well connected or simply having the right idea at the right time. Someone who had the foresight/luck to get into the vaping industry or bitcoin or whatever at the right time could become a millionaire/billionaire without any real talent. There are many YouTubers who can barely edit a video that got hundreds of thousands or milllions of subscribers via luck and timing. There are programmers who don't know what a switch statement here is how classes/OOP works who make thousands a month from game development on Patreon.
In many cases, talent and hard work sadly matters less than finding the right audience to appeal to, being good at marketing/sales and being able to network well/have good connections.
- achillesheels 7y agoYour hindsight bias is omitting the risk, or uncertain return on investment, in a business person throwing their lives at vaping, and the perseverance in keeping at it.
- Swizec 7y agoSpotting opportunities and trends is a skill. Building a network is a skill. Seizing opportunities is a talent I’d say. You’re falling for the fallacy that technical brilliance/execution is what matters. It doesn’t. It just needs to be good enough.
- CM30 7y agoNo, I agree with that. Being good at marketing, networking and seeking opportunities and trends are skills. And I don't think that technical brilliance/execution is what matters. As you say, if you're good enough at selling yourself, you can be pretty mediocre/genetically NOT gifted at what you succeed in and do really well off it. But at the same time, there are definitely success stories who just kinda stumbled into it too. Hell, I'd count myself in that camp too, at least at a certain level based on past experiences. I look at some of my past sites, and genuinely wonder how some of them took off. I was terrible at design, mediocre at best at coding, had little idea about marketing and had no network to speak of... and was beating out people who by all means should have done much better. Even now, I've had people I admire complain that their years of effort on YouTube haven't paid off, while I somehow got three times the subscribers without knowing how to properly edit a video. I know tons of people who stumbled to undeserving success, and tons of others who should have done well but didn't.