Comment by miki123211 3 days ago
I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.
If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.
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.
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.
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).
There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness
Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness