"While it's likely true that people who sacrifice everything are rarely successful, I think that the people at the top of their fields almost always have." Not

"While it's likely true that people who sacrifice everything are rarely successful, I think that the people at the top of their fields almost always have." Not to harp on my favorite old saw about randomness, but drawing generalizations like this -- by only looking at the successful end results and searching for common patterns after the fact -- doesn't really help. For example, say there are 10,000,000 who sacrifice everything, and of them, there are 1,000 who are at the top of their field. The other 99,990,000 are "silent evidence". ("silent evidence" is worth googling) Moreover, the actual importance of "sacrificing everything" becomes further masked unless you realize the actual total size of your cohort. What are the odds that someone could become the top of their field without sacrificing everything? e.g., is there a one-in-a-million chance that someone can both be the best and sleep 8 hours a night every night? If so, for some handful of people in your sample, you'd expect them to have succeeded anyway (assuming you could estimate that prior, which is laughable :) This argument can also be used when people applaud "genius investors" with a 100% success rate for any arbitrary finite timespan -- given a large enough population, it'd be expected that someone would pick right N times in a row, and nobody hears or cares about the failures. Similarly, folks argue from the anecdote of a few rags-to-riches stories and say look, income inequality is nothing to worry about! But actually, given the number of people in the bottom 95%, you'd expect some number of them to be able to make it to the top 5% -- and a better metric might be to look at that rate across other developed nations. One in a million times x million = x bestsellers about "how my drive and ambition took me out of the gutter bla bla bla..." Anyway, just pointing out that causation is a very, very difficult nut. (Likewise, starting a startup is hardly irrational -- the host of 'intangibles', plus greater exposure to positive black swans, make it kind of a no brainer :)