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This article glosses over the fact, known to us who have witnessed humans up close in business environments, that success is almost entirely political within an
by dev_hacker 7y ago
This article glosses over the fact, known to us who have witnessed humans up close in business environments, that success is almost entirely political within an organization.
- CarelessExpert 7y agoNot to mention one of the most important factors of all: luck. But survivorship bias means we assume all successful people hold a unique skill and wisdom that, if we only did the same, we'd find similar success.
- collyw 7y agoWould you agree that working hard will generate more opportunities to be lucky?
- schwurb 7y agoSo does buying more lottery tickets. Surely, the odds at being lucky are better than in playing lottery. However, they are much less predictable than people assume. We tend to systematically overestimate our own influence and underestimate external factors.
- kgantchev 7y agoThen why do we value talented people at all? How much of their work is luck and how much is talent? If not much is talent, then I should be able to get lucky with people who aren't talented.
- AstralStorm 7y agoThere are degrees of success. Doing good work is only the most basic. Even really good work you're talented in. Getting anything else requires opportunity. Even discovering where your talents lie takes resources. And there's also genetic luck, not necessarily biological but also wealth and environment. Without that many talents are unknown or undeveloped. This kind of luck cannot be made. Nobody can actually find people with undeveloped talents. You'd have to force them to try a wide variety of occupations, preferably early so that they can develop it. The people we value are not just any talented, they're developed talents that have been noticed, and beyond that lucky geniuses.
- bdavisx 7y agoI would agree that having wealthy parents generates a lot more opportunities to be lucky.
- collyw 7y agoI'll take that as a yes.
- CarelessExpert 7y agoWhich is itself just another form of luck.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- BerislavLopac 7y agoNo. Or rather yes, but it also generates equally more opportunity to be unlucky. So the two cancel out.
- sparker72678 7y agoYes. 100%. I don't think anyone likes to admit that very few things in life are actually within our control, which makes it desirable to ascribe success to hard work, or intelligence, or whatever. I started a consultancy that failed, was part of a small team with a moderately successful product, and now am part of a small team with a much more successful product. All of that happened while former colleagues were working on much more successful products making a lot more money than I was. In none of those cases was the outcome related to hard work, skill, or desire. Sometimes you have the right people together in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you don't. --- None of which is to say that luck is the _only_ factor. Part of taking advantage of the luck is doing the best work you can, and honing your skills to the best of your ability, so that if the opportunity pops up you can grab it. But just because you haven't had the success you've wanted doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you at all.
- redisman 7y agoBut hold on, why don't you just buy this cargo-cult self-help book and you too can be a success*!
- kryptiskt 7y agoOne would think that being smart should be an asset when playing politics, though.
- olau 7y agoSmart people I know tend to make their own decisions, including whether to participate in specific games or not.
- mdgrech23 7y agoPlaying politics might be to abstract of a term. How about if someone in a position of power above you likes you or not. If say your bosses boss thinks your amazing then they can pull you up. Keep in mind though this big boss might only want to pull you up to undermine your current boss. that's the political part.
- dougmwne 7y agoI think you really illustrate GP's point in a fantastic way. Let's define "smart" as the kind of smarts that would be in abundance on HN: Technical smarts, rapid learning smarts, knowledge smarts, creative smarts, idea smarts. A smart person might be good at school and individual contribuitorship, and so believe that they should naturally be good at political games as well. But truly, politics takes a whole other set of smarts and the things that make you an excellent IC do not much overlap with things that make you good at the political game: charisma, selling, risk-taking, deep emotional intelligence, extroversion, strategic intuition, sociopathy, commanding presence. Many smart engineers can't even see see that the game is being played or they realize it long after the match has been won. They are not the players, but the pieces on the board.
- dev_hacker 7y agoThis is so true and sad. Often the smartest people at a company are literally just being moved about by the business people. They literally can't see the real game above them.
- 7y ago