Luck, skill, & timing all have to come together for a big hit. Skill you can collect. Timing is a matter of waiting & then not waiting. Luck is, well, luck.
There's a lot more timing / luck involved than we care to admit in those huge success stories.
Put Bill Gates somewhere besides Lakeside & he doesn't have access to the UW mainframe in school. Does he become who he is today? Probably, but hard to argue that didn't accelerate things.
Maybe success is like surfing: the best surfers need great waves & the skills to make something great from them.
Hard to be sure right? I think there's a real case to be made for 1 in 10k successful.
He probably wouldn't have built out the scheduling software for the school. His Dad was deep into UW already though, so maybe he finds a way on UW campus?
This reminds me of a book I finished recently called “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”, from a couple of ML researchers on the topic of the search for extraordinary achievements, and it even offered a different perspective on innovation in the context of evolution - instead of winning the competition of local optima / survival of the fittest, organisms escape the competition to a new paradigm and flourish.
It completely changed the way I think about working towards goals and encouraged me to do more exploratory work even though it may not seem to add to any immediate concrete objectives.
Luck, skill, & timing all have to come together for a big hit. Skill you can collect. Timing is a matter of waiting & then not waiting. Luck is, well, luck.
Theme of “Fooled by randomness”.
There's a lot more timing / luck involved than we care to admit in those huge success stories.
Put Bill Gates somewhere besides Lakeside & he doesn't have access to the UW mainframe in school. Does he become who he is today? Probably, but hard to argue that didn't accelerate things.
Maybe success is like surfing: the best surfers need great waves & the skills to make something great from them.
I think he would be merely 1 in 10k successful (already great) rather than 1 in a billion.
Hard to be sure right? I think there's a real case to be made for 1 in 10k successful.
He probably wouldn't have built out the scheduling software for the school. His Dad was deep into UW already though, so maybe he finds a way on UW campus?
This reminds me of a book I finished recently called “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective”, from a couple of ML researchers on the topic of the search for extraordinary achievements, and it even offered a different perspective on innovation in the context of evolution - instead of winning the competition of local optima / survival of the fittest, organisms escape the competition to a new paradigm and flourish.
It completely changed the way I think about working towards goals and encouraged me to do more exploratory work even though it may not seem to add to any immediate concrete objectives.