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Comment by donquichotte | Hacker News Reader

When reading interviews like this I often fall into the mental trap of thinking: "if I do everything like this guy, I'll be just as successful!" Of course, this is not true. To become hugely successful, one must in the right place at the right time and do the right thing. A large part of it is luck (or so I like telling myself), so "advice" from very successful people is just like a lottery winner's advice on how to choose the numbers.

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Like many HN readers I find biographies and founder's stories absolutely fascinating but treating them as anything other than success porn is setting yourself up for a major disappointment, IMO.

I disagree completely. While hitting it as big as Jeff Bezos did relies on luck, there's generally themes and qualities that lend themselves to being "lucky" as you call it. And even if you dont hit it as big as Bezos, those qualities can improve your life and other's opinion of you. For example, Jeff Bezos always gets the job done. Nearly every tech success story has some variation of that skill, the ability to complete the task, sometimes in a roundabout way, even if it seemed impossible.

This is not to say acquiring that trait gives you a billion dollar company. But it certainly doesn't hurt to have.

Actually, pretty much all of the advice Bezos gives here resonates a lot with me.

However, measurable factors like intergenerational income elasticity and social mobility appear to show that who you are (luck) is just as important in terms of financial success than what you do.

Or as Scott Adams observed:

"Beware the advice of successful people -- they do not seek company."

Isn't that somewhat paradox-inducing?

Your analogy (quite common on HN) is bad because it totally disregards the weight of luck in these two situations.

Exactly. Lottery winners are multiple, week in, week out, in each country.

Multi-billion entrepreneurs remain 200 or so in 8 billion for years.

So it's hugely less probable. And I'm fairly sure IQ and DNA and work ethic is not that different between 8 billion people to account for such huge a skew in outcomes. In fact we know that IQ is a regular bell curve (and Bezos or Jobs) are nowhere near its upper right limits.

In fact, I'm willing to bet that people with higher IQ, better work ethic and better education than multi-billionaires that are not multi-billionaires.

So it's either some mystical "being good in entrepreneurship" skill (which is tautological way to say their good in business because they're good in business) that they possess, or luck plays a huge role in their ascend.

It's only meaningful if you include the number of people that followed the same strategy and failed, but you don't hear about them because they've failed. Classic survivorship bias.

Not all people who work hard will be successful, but I guarantee all successful people worked hard.

by "successful" do you mean rich ? because there are plenty of counterexamples

And most people who work hard will never be rich

how can successful mean rich if one can be born rich? You can't be born successful. Generally speaking I'd argue that success is improving your standing in life, whether that's financial or otherwise.

Whenever I read biographies of a successful I bring my feet back to the ground by watching this clip of Nelson "Big Head" Bighetti from Silicon Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKjNT6JpF7o

The case in point for luck being confused for skill.

Advice is a form of nostalgia. It's up to the recipient to digest it correctly.

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