The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen.
I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
> Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less."
Over the course of an entire lifetime, the random good vs bad luck tend to wash out and people usually end their lives financially roughly in line with their capabilities. - my personal opinion and experience.
Demonstrably false considering massive wealth inequality and poverty. It's incredibly harmful and uneducated to hold such a callous opinion. It also goes against the plentiful studies showing that socieconomic status (SES) is more significant predictor of success than almost any other attribute.
Simple scenarios:
- immigrants/refugees moving to a different country
- getting visas in what is largely a lottery system
- injury luck with respect to athleticism
- access to equipment and instruments with respect to musical talent
- slavery and generational poverty
The idea that _capability_ is anywhere close to as important as luck fails so many simple tests (let alone empirical studies) that your statement offends me a little bit.
Back when I applied for an H1B visa, the chances that I'd be outright rejected was 30%. The next few years I believe it climbed to 60%. Just the fact that I found a company willing to apply to my visa involved a lot of luck. Even me being on the US before the H1B involved a lot of luck. Then luck to get the visa. So much of my career was based on luck. Sure, I seized some opportunities when they flew by, but it's not like I was steering super hard to make them happen. Some people will make success happen because they're super smart and relentless, but for a lot of people like me, I believe there's an incredible amount of luck involved.
It kind of grinds my gears when some people give lessons on how to be successful and don't acknowledge that luck was a part of it.
Cohorts that graduate into a recession earn less over the course of their lifetimes than cohorts that graduate into normal times. It can take a decade or more to catch back up to their earning potential, meanwhile those who graduated a year earlier or later able to earn compounding interest on their additional income.
I find it hard to believe that birth year is strongly correlated with capabilities.
I would agree, with the caveat of "all else being equal". There is a danger in ignoring vast socioeconomic divides that can put people at a disadvantage that can make things more difficult for certain demographics.
Looking at life as a massive state machine, I think it’s clear that some parts of the state machine are much more beneficial than others. Luck often pushes people into a bad area or good area, and it can be quite difficult to transition out of that area of the state machine, for better or worse.
Competency and hard work are obviously very important, but luck is an enormous factor as well. And luck, along with its compounding effects, is not uniformly distributed across all individuals.
Well, "luck" is a phenomenon of perception, not reality. Since it's people who perceive, being anthropocentric makes sense. On the other hand, that also makes it subjective, hence describing it may reveal more about the describer than the effect.
“Luck is probability taken personally.” – Chip Denman
I’m amazed at how many comments piled up insisting that luck is a major or possibly the most significant factor. Even if true, what a self-defeating outlook. Every accusation is a confession.
Perhaps consider that some people are talking about luck as a way of reasoning about how we should organize society (if luck is a factor that may imply stronger safety nets) while others (like you, I'd gather) are talking about how to approach one's own life? That's how I've been reasoning about the discussion and it helps clarify things.
What you wrote is insightful as to the underlying thinking, but I’m not sure I buy the premise. If luck is the dominating factor, how is the outcome of any election legitimate? Aren’t the winners merely the luckiest? Where’s the safety net for the unfortunate also-rans? Who are the rightful representatives to do the organizing? The questions are interesting because the ancient Athenians would reject what we call democracy due to our reliance on popular elections, which they viewed with suspicion as a tool of oligarchy. Although some posts were elected, they largely preferred sortition or luck of the draw.
Current and former gifted students are likely overrepresented on HN. Underachievement (whether real or perceived) is a source of stress or depression for this population[0], and defense mechanisms[1] are a common coping strategy. In [1], the authors define quadrants based on high or low success orientation and fear of failure.
1. Optimists - high success orientation, low fear of failure: low sense of helplessness
2. Overstrivers - high success orientation, high fear of failure: risk of burnout, tend to have high “defensive pessimism”
3. Acceptors - low success orientation, low fear of failure: tend to have low self esteem and high helplessness
4. Self-protectors - low success orientation, high fear of failure: tend to have high defensive pessimism and self-handicapping
They define defensive pessimism as “artificially lowering expectations of performance when a performance will be evaluated in order to lessen the hurt of failure and turn success into an unexpected surprise” and self-handicapping as “generating conditions that will produce an excuse for failure through actions such as procrastination, task avoidance, withholding effort, and other strategies.” They label both harmful.[0]
To this optimist, assigning everything to luck looks like all of helplessness, defensive pessimism, and self-handicapping: “I’m smarter than that bum, so his success must be due to dumb luck.”
> If luck is the dominating factor, how is the outcome of any election legitimate? Aren’t the winners merely the luckiest?
On the one hand, I think this may be conflating different senses of luck. On the other hand, yes, luck played a big role in the winner of the election ending up in that position, but not because the election itself was akin to a coin flip (hyperbole), but because luck has a small impact innumerable times in the goings on of that individual's life leading up to that point.
> Where’s the safety net for the unfortunate also-rans?
Thinking about this, it's actually a good question. If the goal of an election is to select the person most able to perform the role of the elected position most satisfactorily, then providing a mechanism by which those without access to traditional campaigning resources and capital to participate could allow more qualified individuals to participate in the election who otherwise wouldn't have been able to.
And this is, I think, precisely the point of saying that luck is a bigger factor than people acknowledge because in order to be elected today, you need to have the connections and capital necessary to execute a successful campaign while continuing to fulfill any other obligations you have during the time leading up to the election, and you need to have something in place to deal with not being elected, something to fall back on. That's a whole bunch of moving parts that need to align before it makes sense to participate in an election.
Our capabilities are also luck: genetics, access to education and compounding that the rich will enjoy more often. The homeless person from a broken home trying to stay alive is less capable of writing distributed software. On average. Yes there will be rags to riches stories that make great reads, and set the standard of the “insert country” dream.
Yeah; I have been trying to find ways to support my open source work and educational work over the past year, and I finally struck YouTube algorithm gold with a couple videos last month... but trying to replicate that success is hard.
Sometimes I can spend days or more polishing a blog post or video and making it really good—and it falls flat.
Other times I'll write up a post in an hour or so and it front pages on HN, gets traction on Reddit, etc.
It seems more random than anything, though the fact that I've put in lots of hours on other content means I'm not starting from zero here.
For GitHub sponsors, I didn't get any real traction until I explicitly started asking people to be a sponsor. I don't even have 'rewards' or anything... maybe that would help, maybe not. But it's still hard to get people to commit money to my cause, and I think the same skills are required for this that would be useful in nonprofits and charities soliciting donations.
Hey there -- I came across your blog a year or so ago via the Rpi Drupal stack. Cool stuff.
I didn't realize you had such a large YouTube presence. I'm curious how you got started. You seem to be quite interested in Ansible so I imagine you just started there and it grew organically?
FWIW -- I'm looking to start making YouTube videos on full-stack web development. I used to be a high school teacher before teaching myself programming well enough to do it professionally so I think I'd be pretty good at this topic/market (entry-mid level). I'm just not sure exactly where to start, how to make myself standout compared to others doing the same thing, etc.
Maybe you've written a blog post on this topic before you could direct me to? Is entry level full-stack web dev too broad? Thanks in advance, keep up the good work!
I started live streaming one project pre-COVID. Then when lockdowns started, I used the experience I gained there to do my Ansible 101 series, and it kind of snowballed a bit from there.
I also have a media production and communications background (from college / post-college days), which helps a lot, because even if the tech changes, the techniques don't.
I started out doing video with a mini VHS camera that I put into an old Performa Mac through a TV capture card and I forget what NLE I used at that time. Then I jumped to MiniDV with some nice Canon SD equipment and got some good audio gear and worked from a G3/G4 with Final Cut Express for a while, before I stopped doing much video work for a decade.
Skip forward a few years and now the whole world's 1080p minimum/4K often, and lighting and technique is way more important—but knowing the basics from back in the day means I can still make decent quality video with the equipment I have available.
So just checked out one of your videos, and you seem to have a good process.
I recently bought a mic and a nice webcam (March) to do recordings and live streams, but got hung up on recording processing, etc.
Don’t know if it makes sense for you to do a meta video on that, or just share your thoughts on the OBS software and post processing, or if that’d be something worth reaching out to you on.
Like you, I’m very engaged in OSS, so I’m happy you’re seeing success!
But I'm considering doing a little more in the realm of 'how its made' type videos, because you can do most of the things 'professional' video producers do on a budget, depending on how many nice things you want to do in a video.
Perhaps, but I think a lot of people tend to say that, then conclude that they should just wait around for luck (not saying you're doing this, though).
Another approach is to do everything you can (podcast appearances, for example!) to increase your "luck surface area".
> Perhaps, but I think a lot of people tend to say that, then conclude that they should just wait around for luck (not saying you're doing this, though).
I'm curious as to why you think that? It could be cultural differences but I have never seen that behaviour except from those that are already depressed and have given up.
IMO the simplest analogy for success is poker. You make the best decisions you can given the information you have. You adjust as new information is revealed. Ultimately, success or failure is less relevant than the process.
Yet the same faces seem to show up over and over at the final table because some are better than others at executing the process, maintaining control of emotions, bankroll management, and so on.
Of course given a large enough sample size process wins out! People's capabilities and knowledge differ. The issue is in determining _what_ good process _is_ given the vast environment that is a globalized economy.
That is why socioeconomic status is so important with respect to success. There's a difference when you can play a thousand hands vs. ten.
Luck is arguably the most important variable, so optimize for it. It's less like buying lottery tickets and more like betting on horses but with outsized returns.
If you bet on one horse, in one race, you'll probably lose and blame luck. But if you keep on betting, you're going to get lucky.
5% chance of success on a given attempt just means try 50 times. Which is also why it's important to test ideas fast and cheap, killing bad ideas quickly.
Practically speaking, who you know, who knows you, where you are, and when seem to be the external factors, and the number of distinct attempts seems to be the internal factor.
Work and prayer are not enough. While one's nose is to the grindstone, beavering away at whatever task, someone slightly wiser will notice some shortcut worth a year of diligent labor and prayer. The leisure time that shortcut buys will enable the identification of other valuable knowledge... It may be better yet to join such ingenuity with the labor you're talking about.
But ingenuity is part of work. Granted, knowing when to take a step back from brute force is a skill that must be developed and one at which some seem to have stronger natural aptitude than others.
While what you write is true, quite often lead engineers of big open source projects quit working on the project because they get frustrated of all the people demanding features from them.
As patreon got more successful over time and youtubers make part of their content payed, I would be surprised if many open source engineers without other revenue didn't adopt more of the sponsorware business model.
The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen.
I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.