Success

When most people talk about success, they’re usually referring to the accumulation of money, power, or material possessions. A bigger house, a fancier car, an advanced degree from a prestigious university, a high-paying job with an impressive title. Maybe you’re so successful that you’ve retired from your day job and now you spend your time doing high-profile non-profit work, partly to impress your friends.

When examining extraordinary success stories, we often find that behind many achievements lies a powerful combination of circumstances and opportunities. While talent and effort matter, research consistently shows that success frequently stems from two significant factors: advantageous starting conditions and luck. By “advantageous starting conditions,” I mean having access to resources and opportunities that others don’t. The reality is that exceptional talent faces significant barriers without access to basic opportunities.

The distinction between growth and grind mindsets deserves serious examination. Growth encompasses a deliberate process of learning, skill acquisition, and personal evolution—typically following an upward trajectory. Grind, by contrast, represents pure exertion, often pushing toward exhaustion and burnout. One approach cultivates sustainable advancement; the other frequently leads to diminishing returns.

Speaking broadly, there are two ways to think about life: passively or actively. Passive philosophy amounts to letting things happen, whereas active is about making things happen. I generally try to stay active. If I want something to happen, I need to make it happen. Sitting around waiting for something to happen or for someone to come along and tell you what to do is passive.

Survivorship bias often gets discussed as a cautionary tale. For example, someone might point out a person’s or company’s success, and another will retort with, “But that’s just survivorship bias!” What’s rarely discussed is how to internalize survivorship bias in an actionable way. If you know that most success stories (whether in business, investing, dating, or even the actual lottery) are primarily the result of luck rather than skill, how can you use this information to your advantage?

There are 2 ways to go through life: you can either play the game, or you can play the metagame. The game is 1-dimensional chess, and the metagame is N-dimensional chess. You can apply this idea to just about everything in life. The easiest way to move from playing the game to the metagame is to think about every interaction in terms of incentives. Examining incentives is the easiest way to figure out what people want and how to turn win/lose or lose/lose transactions into win/win.

I really wanted to be a founder of a successful startup (where successful to me means the company can pay its own bills, and pay employees well). However the reality hasn’t matched my ambition and I’ve decided to find a job like a regular chump. I assumed that with work ethic, skills, persistence, and plenty of trial and error I could eventually find success. That hasn’t happened, and I’m nowhere close to making that happen. Being good at computers and working hard doesn’t cut it.