Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.
Once you go deep enough into a personal passion project like that, you run a serious risk of flunking out of school. For most people that feels like a big deal. And for those of us with fewer alternatives in life, it's usually enough to keep us on the straight and narrow path.
People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.
Metaverse and this AI turnaround are characterized by the LACK of perseverance, though. They remind me of the time I bought a guitar and played it for three months.
When you put the guitar down after three months it's one thing, but when you reverse course on an entire line of development in a way that might affect hundreds or thousands of employees it's a failure of integrity.
What if they’re playing a different game? I read a comment on here recently about how the large salaries for AI devs Meta is offering are as much about denying their AI competitors access to that talent pool as it is about anything else.
True, but I was around and saw first hand how Zuckerberg dominated social networking. He was pretty ruthless when it came to both business and technology, and he instilled in his team a religious fervor.
There is luck (and skill) involved when new industries form, with one or a very small handful of companies surviving the many dozens of hopefuls. The ones who do survive, however, are usually the most ruthlessness and know how to leverage skill, business, markets.
It does not mean that they can repeat their success when their industry changes or new opportunities come up.
Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).
Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.
No. Nothing of that scale. I was replying to OP's take on the 3 factors that lead to success in general. I was simply pointing out a 4th factor that plays a big role.
