When you have to justify to yourself why you're a millionaire or a billionaire and "dumb luck, some modicum of skill, and being first" isn't a satisfying reason

When you have to justify to yourself why you're a millionaire or a billionaire and "dumb luck, some modicum of skill, and being first" isn't a satisfying reason, you have to rationalize to yourself that you deserve it because you've got something that those ivory-tower eggheads and non-nerdy simpletons don't. And that thing is fierceness. I've never seen a blog post more worthy of a good old fashioned fisking. I mean come on - "confidence is a self-fullfilling prophecy" - are we being serious here? It's only self-fulfilling because of survivorship bias. Maybe he's running with a crew of super successful founders and that's true, but from my point of view, I remember the dudes at my place of work that could very confidently talk my ear off about something that they half-understood (or very confidently describe an unworkable solution to a problem) and then got fired a month later because they weren't productive enough to meet even the super-low requirements of software development at a car insurance company. It's easy to spin narratives about confidence and restlessness and intelligence when you've surrounded yourself with the winners. Less visible are the people who go all-in on a fintech startup and end up broke a year later. Those people have all the same traits and end up in the same boat as all the other un-fierce nerds.