Winning Attitude, Losing Attitude
areallybadidea.com
areallybadidea.com
The point is that opportunity cost makes a huge difference in the final analysis. The friend with no college degree and no programming skill had very little to lose from the start. But if the "loser" friend is earning a substantial salary and stock options somewhere, the barrier to risky speculative bets is correspondingly higher.
However, this kind of over the shoulder throw at "what it takes to succeed" seems pretty shallow. I'd rather hear about what really made these two people different. How the one overcame the actual challenges s/he encountered and the other did not.
Maybe the key difference between these two people is that the one tried and the other didn't. But this article doesn't really make that argument.
OTOH, I don't have 2 million in annual revenue at the moment :)
It reminds me of a video linked in the Soundcloud Labs post earlier today, which is ostensibly about bootstrapping and customer acquisition, but the guy completely glossed over one of the importantest parts of "bootstrapping," when he relayed half a sentence about how "someone knew one of the top VCs in Finland." (ISTR Finland). Well sure, that probably helped just as much as the OP's friend having "a loser attitude" didn't.
Which makes the whole point irrelevant and illogical. If you want to prove that a "winning attitude" is the key to success, you'd want to compare people who actually tried to do something and who had opposing attitudes and see how they ended up.
Extra points if you do this with enough people to make the results statistically significant.
Please, everyone realize that this argument is logically identical to the original blog post:
I have two friends, one who has blond hair and the other is a redhead. The blond guy always talks about hunting lions in Africa but has never gone on safari. My redhead friend, on the other hand, went to Africa and shot a lion on his first try. It just goes to show you how important it is to have red hair.
That's a BS argument, no? But if you said, "I did a study of 10,000 people who went to Africa and tried to shoot a lion, and red hair correlated with a successful kill more than any other characteristic by a wide margin," then you might want to consider dying your hair with henna before you go try to shoot a lion.