5 ms·

As trite as it sounds, "Success = Hard Work + Opportunity" is still the default equation that makes the most sense to me. And while people from all strata of l

by corry 5y ago

As trite as it sounds, "Success = Hard Work + Opportunity" is still the default equation that makes the most sense to me. And while people from all strata of life work very hard, opportunities are obviously and incredibly unequally distributed (and perhaps becoming more so?). If you were born middle-class in US/Canada 20 - 40 years ago, your access to opportunities to improve your station were/are immense. Layer on your ethnicity, if your parents were in a stable relationship, if you grew up in relative safety, if you had a decent education... hard not to think that your opportunities were 10x or 100x someone who had none of those things. But you also need to define "success". To this crowd, is "success" merely "leading a better life"? I'd argue most of us already have this as our default reality. I.e. the gradual reward for working hard via promotions and relative safety of career. I remember after my startup was acquired, a few people would say to me (well-meaning obviously) "wow it's great your hard work paid off!". And I just said something like "thanks, ya, lots of people work a lot harder than me but didn't get the same outcome - so there was a lot of luck involved too!" etc. Even thinking of my own immigrant grandparents - what THEY did was HARD. I think about those exchanges often. Tech -- at this particular moment in history -- disproportionately rewards "hard work" (which many of us find fun anyways). Or perhaps better to say that Tech provides access to the right kind of opportunities that allow for a DEFAULT "life gets better", with the possibilities of "life suddenly gets 100x better".

koheripbal 5y ago
One thing all tech employees can appreciate is that some people are far more efficient than others. In some cases, by orders of magnitude. You can sort of blend that with "opportunity" if you think it's entirely nurture/education based, but I went to school with a lot of people who had an identical home environment and education as me, and are easily 10x better at coding. There's very little research into how brains function, but I personally believe that human brains are all physically different, in terms of capability, and that everyone has a unique blend of innate talents. So I think the equation is... Success (in x field) = Hard Work + Talent (in x field) + Opportunity (in x field) ...which means that a major key to success is selecting the field that you have a talent for.
- TomGullen 5y ago
  You could probably add in some luck element as well
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    Is it materially different from "opportunity"? If it's luck that isn't associated with starting conditions, I feel that it tends to zero over the course of a lifetime. Good luck and bad luck tend to negate each other, on average.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      Sort of. I have always defined luck as presentation of opportunity. But opportunity is something you are actually capable of taking advantage of. Opportunity is also spotting of 'luck' or making it yourself through work. I see many friends who have incredible opportunities to make their lives better but they never take them as they are blind to the luck they have as they do not understand it. In sales many times they will just cold call people to 'make luck'. It is akin to spam (the spam/scam guys just turned the model up to 11). Just throw as much against the wall and if something sticks it may or may not be an opportunity. Sometimes an opportunity is home run. Many times it is a dud. With 'bad luck' you are given something you do not want but you with the correct actions mitigate the outcomes. That takes work too. If you do not try at all you are guaranteed an outcome where nothing happens. In fact if you factor in 'bad luck' you are worse off doing nothing as you have not taken action to mitigate negative outcomes.
dougmwne 5y ago
I propose Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2. That is to say that hard work without opportunity equals nothing and opportunity without work equals nothing. But work and opportunity do not have a linear relationship, a bit more opportunity can greatly leverage a bit of extra work. Big opportunities practically become self-fulfilling. Just look at all the poor students who became president. Their lack of work in school couldn't hold them back from their massive opportunities. I guarantee you are not working harder at tech than many, many minimum wage workers.
- JoshTko 5y ago
  This cannot be emphasized enough, the equation is multiplicative not additive. Most people have an opportunity of less than 1.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Having done both tech and minimum wage, the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine. Minimum wage jobs often use humans as robots, and most humans can move around in relatively complex ways all days - that's what our brain evolved to do. I can do it, the minimum wage workers can do it. On the other hand most people can't write code. I'm not confident that most of the people that I worked with could be taught to. I don't know if this is thanks to my genes, my brain, my education, my parents, or something else; and that's certainly not something I hold against them. I don't consider myself better than them because of that. But the reality is that most tech workers could hold minimum wage jobs, while the opposite isn't true. I guess that it's a really good illustration of your "Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2". Even if my ex-collegues work harder than me, by having more opportunities than them I can easily earn more/have better jobs.
  - tristor 5y ago
    I think this is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed. We've seen our economy shift to one where the highest paid jobs are those that are based predominantly on knowledge (doctor, lawyer, engineer, and also licensed trades like plumber, electrician, etc.). Knowledge is something anyone can attain, but some people gain knowledge easier than others... we generally refer to that ability to gain and retain knowledge as intelligence. There's a huge cliff, rather than a progression, between menial low-skilled jobs and high-skill jobs, where before there was a much more progressive increase in income. This has had numerous impacts on society, such as creating the K-shaped recovery coming out of 2020, and the vastly different outcomes for unemployment across socioeconomic lines. Intelligence is on a bell curve, flatter for men, more rounded for women, but nonetheless has a relatively normal distribution, and the types of work that are most well-rewarded in society are shifting right-wards (towards higher IQ individuals) along that distribution. It's a simple fact that our economy is shifting in such a way that the average person no longer has the same opportunities for success that the average person had 20-30 years ago. We don't know all the reasons why someone might have higher intelligence than someone else, whether it's genetic, or a factor of their home life, or some other psychological trigger that happens in childhood. But it's a simple fact, at this point, that higher IQ people are likely to have higher earning outcomes in our current economy. It's not just that opportunity is a multiplicative factor (as others have mentioned), it's that you must have the capabilities to capitalize on an opportunity and turn it into a successful outcome. Probably many of those minimum wage workers have the necessary intelligence to do more complex knowledge-based work that is more richly rewarded, but many of them do not, and they are being left behind as our economy changes. One of the last great jobs for people who are of average intelligence to have meaningful economic mobility is going to be eliminated by automation within the next 20-30 years (OTR trucking), and within the same time span our society will have no choice but to wrestle with the reality we've created. I think it's obvious at this point that our socioeconomic structure does not work well for everyone, but that changing it to work better for those left behind will artificially hinder technological and social advancement for all. This is one of the reasons I think UBI is likely to be the path forward for society in the future. Everyone deserves basic human dignity and the needs met to support that dignity, and our continued increases in productivity through technology make it possible to allow for that even as there is no longer meaningful work for large swathes of the population.

by corry 5y ago

koheripbal 5y ago

One thing all tech employees can appreciate is that some people are far more efficient than others. In some cases, by orders of magnitude. You can sort of blend that with "opportunity" if you think it's entirely nurture/education based, but I went to school with a lot of people who had an identical home environment and education as me, and are easily 10x better at coding. There's very little research into how brains function, but I personally believe that human brains are all physically different, in terms of capability, and that everyone has a unique blend of innate talents. So I think the equation is... Success (in x field) = Hard Work + Talent (in x field) + Opportunity (in x field) ...which means that a major key to success is selecting the field that you have a talent for.

TomGullen 5y ago
You could probably add in some luck element as well
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Is it materially different from "opportunity"? If it's luck that isn't associated with starting conditions, I feel that it tends to zero over the course of a lifetime. Good luck and bad luck tend to negate each other, on average.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    Sort of. I have always defined luck as presentation of opportunity. But opportunity is something you are actually capable of taking advantage of. Opportunity is also spotting of 'luck' or making it yourself through work. I see many friends who have incredible opportunities to make their lives better but they never take them as they are blind to the luck they have as they do not understand it. In sales many times they will just cold call people to 'make luck'. It is akin to spam (the spam/scam guys just turned the model up to 11). Just throw as much against the wall and if something sticks it may or may not be an opportunity. Sometimes an opportunity is home run. Many times it is a dud. With 'bad luck' you are given something you do not want but you with the correct actions mitigate the outcomes. That takes work too. If you do not try at all you are guaranteed an outcome where nothing happens. In fact if you factor in 'bad luck' you are worse off doing nothing as you have not taken action to mitigate negative outcomes.

dougmwne 5y ago

I propose Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2. That is to say that hard work without opportunity equals nothing and opportunity without work equals nothing. But work and opportunity do not have a linear relationship, a bit more opportunity can greatly leverage a bit of extra work. Big opportunities practically become self-fulfilling. Just look at all the poor students who became president. Their lack of work in school couldn't hold them back from their massive opportunities. I guarantee you are not working harder at tech than many, many minimum wage workers.

JoshTko 5y ago
This cannot be emphasized enough, the equation is multiplicative not additive. Most people have an opportunity of less than 1.
Zababa 5y ago
Having done both tech and minimum wage, the difference is that I can do the minimum wage job and they couldn't do mine. Minimum wage jobs often use humans as robots, and most humans can move around in relatively complex ways all days - that's what our brain evolved to do. I can do it, the minimum wage workers can do it. On the other hand most people can't write code. I'm not confident that most of the people that I worked with could be taught to. I don't know if this is thanks to my genes, my brain, my education, my parents, or something else; and that's certainly not something I hold against them. I don't consider myself better than them because of that. But the reality is that most tech workers could hold minimum wage jobs, while the opposite isn't true. I guess that it's a really good illustration of your "Success = Hard Work * Opportunity^2". Even if my ex-collegues work harder than me, by having more opportunities than them I can easily earn more/have better jobs.
- tristor 5y ago
  I think this is an important point, and one that is rarely discussed. We've seen our economy shift to one where the highest paid jobs are those that are based predominantly on knowledge (doctor, lawyer, engineer, and also licensed trades like plumber, electrician, etc.). Knowledge is something anyone can attain, but some people gain knowledge easier than others... we generally refer to that ability to gain and retain knowledge as intelligence. There's a huge cliff, rather than a progression, between menial low-skilled jobs and high-skill jobs, where before there was a much more progressive increase in income. This has had numerous impacts on society, such as creating the K-shaped recovery coming out of 2020, and the vastly different outcomes for unemployment across socioeconomic lines. Intelligence is on a bell curve, flatter for men, more rounded for women, but nonetheless has a relatively normal distribution, and the types of work that are most well-rewarded in society are shifting right-wards (towards higher IQ individuals) along that distribution. It's a simple fact that our economy is shifting in such a way that the average person no longer has the same opportunities for success that the average person had 20-30 years ago. We don't know all the reasons why someone might have higher intelligence than someone else, whether it's genetic, or a factor of their home life, or some other psychological trigger that happens in childhood. But it's a simple fact, at this point, that higher IQ people are likely to have higher earning outcomes in our current economy. It's not just that opportunity is a multiplicative factor (as others have mentioned), it's that you must have the capabilities to capitalize on an opportunity and turn it into a successful outcome. Probably many of those minimum wage workers have the necessary intelligence to do more complex knowledge-based work that is more richly rewarded, but many of them do not, and they are being left behind as our economy changes. One of the last great jobs for people who are of average intelligence to have meaningful economic mobility is going to be eliminated by automation within the next 20-30 years (OTR trucking), and within the same time span our society will have no choice but to wrestle with the reality we've created. I think it's obvious at this point that our socioeconomic structure does not work well for everyone, but that changing it to work better for those left behind will artificially hinder technological and social advancement for all. This is one of the reasons I think UBI is likely to be the path forward for society in the future. Everyone deserves basic human dignity and the needs met to support that dignity, and our continued increases in productivity through technology make it possible to allow for that even as there is no longer meaningful work for large swathes of the population.