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Comment by fzeroracer | Hacker News Reader

Do you have an argument against the authors points that does not consist of adhominem and projection?

The self-made illusion is precisely that because we ignore the many things that gave us a headstart in life and allowed us to do the things that would've caused other people to fail. The only reason why I'm here now is because I took on a risk of going bankrupt moving across the country for a job opportunity in an industry that suddenly became very volatile. Had I been laid off or had the winds shifted and resulted in my first job being downsized, I would've been financially destroyed and dropped right back into poverty. We ignore the sheer amount of luck and circumstance in our career and lives in favor of telling a story where we're the hero.

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There's always an element of chance in success. Every new business was a risk. Every move across the country a bet. Every new product a gamble. To say, "well I/he/she just got lucky" I think ignores that fact.

Sports are perhaps a good allegory. Sports always have chance & luck. But the best teams have a track record of tilting the odds consistently in their favor, by working to minimize chance and making the most of luck. Does anybody actually say "Well the Patriots/Yankees just got lucky"?

No they generally say they have deep pockets and can afford the best players.

> Do you have an argument against the authors points that does not consist of adhominem and projection?

Did you read the first part of my comment? Literally the first two paragraphs are exactly what you're asking for.

> The self-made illusion is precisely that because we ignore the many things that gave us a headstart in life and allowed us to do the things that would've caused other people to fail. The only reason why I'm here now is because I took on a risk of going bankrupt moving across the country for a job opportunity in an industry that suddenly became very volatile. Had I been laid off or had the winds shifted and resulted in my first job being downsized, I would've been financially destroyed and dropped right back into poverty. We ignore the sheer amount of luck and circumstance in our career and lives in favor of telling a story where we're the hero.

The fact that luck is involved does not make being 'self-made' an illusion. You're probably an intelligent person, if this opportunity would have blown up for you, you'd have done something else.

Yeah, like fall back into poverty.

People that are wildly successful often hit some very narrow window. You can be persistent and try and try again which increases your odds, but it's still a crap-shoot.

You have to be lucky perhaps to be wildly successful, but you'd have to be quite unlucky to work hard and take smart risks and fail to be successful at all. Similarly, you have to be very, very lucky to rise from poverty to wealth without working hard or taking smart risks. In particular, seeing and executing on a narrow-window opportunity that others miss is itself an accomplishment.

The idea that self-made success is purely a matter of luck is either a myth or true only by some meaningless definition of what constitutes "luck" (i.e., you're lucky that you have the ability and personality to reliably execute well and achieve success).

You can do everything right, work very hard, and still fail. You can do everything wrong, be a complete idiot, and still succeed.

There's ways you can increase your luck, or be more observant as to opportunities, but it's self-deluding if you don't think luck plays a huge factor in success.

It plays a huge factor in the specific degree of success, but a much smaller factor in whether or not you are successful at all. If you do everything right and fail, you are an anomaly pretty much by definition.

You do realize there's arguably at least two billion people who through no fault of their own will never, ever succeed, no matter how hard they try?

You're born in the middle of Tibet as a persecuted ethnic minority. You're on a tiny island nation with no economic future. You're from a part of Africa that's seen nothing but civil war interspersed with famine.

You can do everything right but the deck is so stacked against you there's no winning move.

I don't care to generalize the principle outside of the western world. A valid generalization probably exists, but the terms are already so abstract that I doubt it's possible to have a meaningful conversation.

Yes, there are a vanishingly tiny fraction of people in the western world who will do everything right and still fail, and a similar fraction who will do everything wrong and still succeed; however, they're the exceptions that prove the rule.

No, I likely wouldn't have been able to do much else. I was already poor with health issues. It was only because of that first job that I was able to start addressing those problems before they became dire. I had to take a deep gamble because I quite literally moved with $0 to my name.

It sounds like you're really out of touch with how deep poverty can affect people.

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