Super anecdotal, but most people I know that fit your description had one success early in their careers and then rode that wave to future successes. That is de

Super anecdotal, but most people I know that fit your description had one success early in their careers and then rode that wave to future successes. That is definitely some people, and perhaps even many of the people who are the most visible (since that visibility is one way to ride the wave). But by far most of the successful people I know have confronted a ton of failure as well, and adapt to it quickly: they treat it as a noisy data point, take what they can from it (like updating blind spots, etc.), and move on. You don’t make 100% of the shots you don’t take, and precisely because there are so many variables you can’t control, you need to take many shots. The folks who see failures as inevitable and as barriers to success and who as a result don’t even bother to try…almost by definition cannot succeed. I think you may have the causality pointing the wrong way here.