Grit and perseverence, however you call them, are important aspects to success, but not THE secret to success.
If you look at the subset of people who enjoy "success" in life, a large number of them will display those qualitites, no doubt. But some of them could have attained it by sheer luck, filial connections, or others.
Now, if you look at the complementary subset (people who do not enjoy "success" in life), I guarantee you will find plenty of gritee people in there, in addition to people who display personal qualities not conducive to success (which by no mean excludes them from enjoying success in live, given the proper circumstances - see previous paragraph).
That's the aspect I do not enjoy about those "secret to success stories: no one ever considers the people who did everthing rigth, but did not succeed. It happen much more often than we think. No one cares for the losers, whatever the cause, alas. This is the 'survivorship paradox' described by Cicero... Taleb called it the Silent cemetary evidence.
One more aspect, if I may: when can one determine someone else is a "success", or a "failure"? People certainly are entitled to more than one shot at success, and negative results are certainly a valid way to pinpoint your path towards success.
So, grit is not THE secret path to success, but if your goal is to be successful, then internalising a gritee spirit certainly demultiply the possibilities to enjoy success.
Survivorship bias is the major flaw in every business book and in all biographies of successful people. "Look at the attributes that success stories have in common, and IGNORE them when present in unsuccessful stories." This leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich people and businesses, expecting success. Go read _Good To Great_. Business schools across the world are enamored with this book, but it's basically 300 pages of survivorship bias.
For every person you point to and say grit and perseverance made them successful, I'll point to ten who failed despite grit and perseverance.
Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.
It's the whole "success hides failure" problem. It's really tempting to assume that everything a successful person or company does contributes to their success, but the truth is closer to, they did 10 things right and 9 things wrong. But it's difficult or impossible to determine which is which, hence the cargo-culting.
Even more frustrating is working for a successful company, because anybody who advocates change can be shot down with the argument that everything is going well therefore that's empirical proof that the thing you want to change is clearly just fine and dandy.
Ultimately the best we can do as individuals is to cultivate an innate sense of skepticism in all things, avoid reductivism, never drink our own Kool-Aid, and never fall into the trap of thinking that we've figured it all out and don't need to think and grow anymore.
> Very true. It's a lot easier to look at failures and understand why they failed than look at successes and understand why they succeeded. I would read the hell out of a book full of accurate postmortems of failed businesses, products, movements, governments, etc.
Survivorship bias actually works both ways: by studying only the failures you are quite likely to misunderstand what made them fail and you might zero in on characteristics that are actually shared by many successful businesses.
>This leads to people and companies cargo-culting the behaviors of well-known rich people and businesses, expecting success.
I'm betting those business dudes are networking with people who share similar views more often than not. So if you get a large portion buying into what the books are selling, that will probably predict who they choose to network and work with [citation needed]. The network can then cushion your failures and amplify your successes.
Bonus points if you bring your Ivy League papers to the table, of course.
It would be survivorship bias if the conclusion drawn was "if you have grit and perseverance, you'll succeed". That's not what I've gotten out of any book ever, it was always "these traits allowed me to take advantage of this opportunity that presented itself".
It's about developing skills and traits that would make you more likely to succeed should an opportunity present itself, or to help you realize an opportunity has presented itself.
There is no magic formula. There is no trait or skill that will guarantee success, but for every success story there is something that allowed them to take advantage of the cards they were dealt that without they would have been unable to.
Funny, I just happened to listen to the Freakonomics podcast with Angela Duckworth on it this morning... It also goes into a better definition of grit, why they measure what they measure, etc.
Grit basically boils down to (me paraphrasing the author paraphrasing her work) interest in the subject, finding meaning in it that can help you get through troughs of despair, a positive outlook that you can get better with effort, and an ability to find nuance in the activity so that instead of jumping to the next new subject you can focus on a specific subset of the thing you're trying to get better at, leveling up if you will.
What I took from what she said is that anyone can be gritty at anything if they want to be, but you have to ACTUALLY want it, not just say you do. Grit, the way she describes it just seems to be a roll up of a lot of values we (at least I) intuitively have always felt were important for being able to get better at something.
I always knew I was better at certain things because I liked doing them more than other and not the other way around because I was naturally very good at some things that I just didn't like and never got any better (golf). There were some things I liked and got very good at that initially I was horrible at (archery).
I think the thing that people who don't feel gritty (I have always been described as someone who is, which I think has made me grittier all around, just to reaffirm it) can get from this is that grit isn't necessarily something you are born with and it doesn't necessarily apply to all of life. it's also something you can foster and work on- but you have to be honest about how you're applying it.
So what happens when you have grit for things that you don't have access to, but not the things that you do have access to? Blocked by a lack of opportunity in the things that you love.
Well, maybe that's part of why some people seem to always move from thing to thing and never seem to succeed or finish.
Maybe you find something that is mentally/emotionally close enough.
Maybe if you're 'naturally' grittier you make do with what you do have an opportunity for without even knowing you're making due.
I personally, have been pretty good in my life about seeing things through to the end (or a certain level of competency) and trying my hardest at it.
My dad, when I was young said something along the lines of "the things you like doing the least you should make sure you do the best so you don't have to do it again" and I've always kind of run with it. I also have a lot of very different interests sports, electronics, music, science- so maybe because of my wife array of baseline interest I can get over the initial humps that would have people quitting earlier? No clue, maybe I'm just lucky to be kinda/sorta okay at things enough to get initial positive feedback to make me want to do more.
What I gained from what the author found was that anyone who really wants to, and takes a practical approach to learning/gaining competency in something can and there are some general steps that can be followed along the way to keep the positive feedback loop going. You won't necessarily ever become Mozart or Lebron James, but you can entertain the family on the piano or be a helluva free throw shooter if you actually want.
That's probably because there is no such thing as "THE secret to success". In the real world, people succeed or fail based on a complicated mixture of many different parameters. I doubt there is any one "thing" that we can actually prove is both necessary and sufficient for become "successful" (depending on how one defines "successful").
The problem with identifying such people is that we can usually point to some tangible cause of failure. I think it's more useful to analyze the traits common to most successful people:
* Not being born into extreme poverty
* Having a basic education (not many successful illiterate people)
* Having access to at least one strong connection
* Having "true grit", whatever that means
* Discovering an available niche
I agree with the premise that not being born into extreme poverty and having a strong connection within the activity/field that successful people are in are important. To me it just seems like if you don't have to worry about how you are going to survive at a basic level, it allows one the freedom to to explore higher order activities.
The article doesn't seem to do the author as much of a favor as the Freakonomics podcast she was just on, she seems to be describing that there is not necessarily true grit, that it has a lot to do with a person's relationship to the activity on many levels.
It's the only defining factor that can't be trained. Lucky beats smart. And if you take most of the really big successes like Facebook, Google etc. they where successful were a bunch of other people with equal grit and talent werent.
Many many people have grit and perseverence. Many people have talent, business understanding, good timing, excellent understanding of product and so on. And of course the more you play the game the better chance of success (statistically)
But when all is said and done unless we are talking about crony capitalism where you use political control to ensure success. Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful and others are not IMO.
Luck just means you don't know the cause behind an effect.
Attributing success to "luck" is therefore simply putting the conditions for success outside your locus of control.
Attributing it to "grit" or some other personal quality puts the conditions for success within your locus of control.
For many people (myself included), the latter philosophy is more helpful as it makes success seem more deliberately achievable. Combined with a strong sense of agency, this philosophy can imbue its proponents with more confidence than those waiting for "luck" to happen (or who have given up on it happening).
That doesn't really change that of all those with grit those who are the luckiest win over those with grit who aren't.
You are trying to apply a method to being successful. Have grit and you will be succesful.
But having grit is only going to take you so far. Many people have grit. Luck will take you the rest.
The problem with you way of looking at things is that you are basically saying that those that don't have success don't have grit and therefore imply that it's their fault they don't. Which then create weird myths like the poor people are just lazy and don't have enough grit etc.
This is a lie with enough evidence to contradict. The fact that much of success is due to circumstances has been proven again and again. That does not mean that those that were successful din't also have grit. They did, they were also just the lucky ones with grit.
> you are basically saying that those that don't have success don't have grit
I don't remember saying that - please point out where I did.
Thinking about your success in terms of factors you can control can improve your chances of success if you draw confidence from that philosophy, and lots of people do. The appearance of confidence (and the correlation between confidence and appearing confident) has been shown to improve chances of success in various situations.
I said originally that luck is just the set of things you don't know about. By definition, it thusly can't be an "encompassing reason" (implied singular) - it's a name that refers to a collection of reasons (a subset of all possible reasons).
The discussions of confidence mindset and one's control over "success" are orthogonal, but I'm happy to discuss them.
Of course it can be an encompassing reason if that is the one that is to find in every case. Grit isn't, some are successful without grit, confidence isn't either some are successful while not confident.
But luck, luck you find in every single case.
The reason of success is luck luck in chance encounters which then leads to unpredictable outcomes amongst others success.
Sounds like a post-hoc fallacy to me. Or maybe a "just so story". You can always unwind somebody's story and find some point in the story where something happened that they could not necessarily have predicted, and cry "see, this person only succeeded because of luck". But we can't evaluate all the branches in the tree of outcomes that didn't happen exactly because they didn't happen.
If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened anyway.
You don't like the idea that luck could be the actual all embedding factor of success.
"If you believe that people, to some extent "make their own luck" via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if "lucky event A" didn't happen, then something else "lucky" would have happened anyway."
No you can't speculate that at all. But I would like to see you try.
You are just trying to insist that there is this path to success that can be taken without luck being involved which just isn't the case.
The question that was asked is whether grit is the one factor to become successful.
It's not, it can't be because if it was everyone who had grit would be successful they are not and so something else is needed. That thing is luck. Whether lucky that you were born with better of parents, higher IQ, extreme talent, went to the right school, meet the right people at the right time, have the right idea at the right time and so on.
Grit is only there to make you stay in the game long enough that you might end up being successful but it can never be the all encompassing factor that explains it all. Only luck can.
I really don't know what you're talking about. You're putting words in my mouth that I never said, and/or apparently intentionally misinterpreting my words. So with all due respect, I'm going to just drop out of this "discussion".
Luck does indeed mean you don't know the cause and effect and that those conditions are outside of your control.
That's because they are.
It may be helpful for you to maintain a belief that all of the conditions for success are within your control. That doesn't stop it from being a false belief.
It also won't be so helpful if you turn out not to be successful.
> all the conditions for success are within your control
I don't feel this is a necessary conclusion. In addition to accepting that some factors are outside your control, one must also realize that not all factors are weighted equally.
You talked about choosing how to attribute success based on how 'useful' the belief is rather than how accurate.
If you are now trying to claim that luck is a factor but isn't weighted highly, this changes nothing about your desire to choose a belief that is false based on how motivating it is.
So there are a few orthogonal discussions here (largely due to lack of focus in my original comment, I'm afraid - haven't had my Sunday morning coffee yet).
Firstly, luck is a label for a subset of all factors on the outcome of a particular endeavor: specifically the subset that we aren't consciously aware of. I wanted to refute it as a singular reason for success (being, by definition, multiple reasons).
Secondly, I think an attitude that mostly dismisses the importance of luck (by emphasizing the importance of factors you can control) can help inspire confidence, an often-necessary and entirely-insufficient factor in successful human endeavors.
Thirdly, I make no claims as to knowing the single most heavily-weighted factor for success, or even the absolute weight of any given factors. I have lightly-held opinions about relative weights of various factors, based on my own experience and things I've read on the Internet.
I disagree with your refutation of 'luck' in point 1:
I agree that luck is an aggregate of 'all factors beyond your control', but I do not agree that conscious awareness is sufficient to place things into your control. Therefore, luck includes all factors beyond our control, whether we are aware of them or not. It's perfectly reasonable to group these together under a category. If your argument is that aggregate categories are invalid, then you must apply the same logic to 'success'.
More importantly, I agree with your second point, but I think it's harmful. Confidence based on self-deception is known as hubris, and leads to deceiving others and thus doing harm.
There is no need to deceive oneself in order to feel confident. That simply comes from an accurate sense of one's capabilities and the situation one finds oneself in.
I didn't mean to imply that being aware of conditions is sufficient for being in control of them. Obviously that would be wrong.
> Aggregate categories are invalid
In the search for a single factor, groups of factors seem like invalid entries.
Talking about the influence of chance on the outcome of a given set of circumstances in the universe, we're getting into free will / determinism here (and that's probably not going to be a terribly productive discussion) so I'll move on to your other point.
> I think it's harmful
I'll concede that in a vacuum you'd be right, but we're not in a vacuum. Making decisions based on factors you know about is different from consciously ignoring external factor outside your control or assuming that the factors you control are weighted more heavily. I think this conclusion of yours about my argument, though, is based on the "awareness" vs "control" confusion from above, so my overall conclusion is that we're on the same page.
> In the search for a single factor, groups of factors seem like invalid entries.
Grit is most certainly a group of factors.
Nobody is taking about free will or determinism. You are introducing that as a straw man.
We are not on the same page. Weights or not, you are advocating intentionally miss-attributing effects to causes that are under your control. Making reference to 'confusion' doesn't change that, and looks like another straw man.
Given that you advocate self-deception, your response seems consistent with your policy. I salute you for your consistency.
ThomPete's comment was about learning from other people.
If you look at eg lottery winners, you could try to put getting the winning ticket into their `locus of control'. But it wouldn't tell you how to replicate that success.
The problem with that viewpoint is that if you view people as fully free agents you start to attack an entire political/socioeconomic ideology that, sadly, runs our educational institutions and is closer to a religion than anything scientific. If you allow for the idea that any individual with a basic education and spirit can change the world, you unravel the idea that governments/corporations/institutions are more important than personal freedom, because we'd all be a bunch of broke, irresponsible losers without their "help".
You say "luck and network", I say "grit". I'm curious to know if there is some experiment we could perform that we both agree could settle the matter?
For example, imagine we assign 'grit' ratings to students who finish high school. Later we find that students with high grit scores tend to complete a university degree much more often than those with low grit scores. Would that change your mind about the importance of grit?
If you read the biographies of famous British people, you soon get used to reading that X or Y did okay/miserably at Oxford or Cambridge, but one day as they happened to bump into A or B who knew them from Oxford or Cambridge who said "I'm looking for someone to do something. Do you want to have a go?"
In the US, we already know from numerous surveys that after the first graduate intake, most software hires are made by personal recommendation - which is obviously going to exclude anyone who isn't part of a network.
So those are two examples of the value of networks.
As for "grit" - what does the word even mean? If someone gambles everything in startups and loses everything three times in a row before giving up, do they have grit or not?
Many people have grit, not all of them are successful. Some people don't have grit yet are still successful.
So obviously grit isn't the unifying thing that leads to success.
High Schools and Universities are by no metrics a measurement for success. And if you want to make them that you can start with the luck of whether you are born with rich parents or poor parents.
Of course grit is good to have, but it's not what define success.
Disagree. No matter how lucky you are. No matter who you or your family knows. If you give up quickly because you lack patience and/or grit, you are very unlikely to still be successful. How many startups succeed or become "unicorns" without at least a single pivot? Precious few. IMO grit is not the only factor of a successful person, but it sure as heck is one of the most common things you'll see in a successful person. A few examples.
Elon Musk, first generation immigrant, didn't come from money, is now a billionaire. An article was released this week interviewing Mr Musk where he plainly states he put his desk at the end of the assembly line in th Hawthorne Tesla factory. He then went on to mention how he has a sleeping bag and often sleeps there.
One of my favorites is to look at how many awful failures Abraham Lincoln went through. It would have broken most people, yet he soldiered on and ended up being one of the most important Presidents in US history: www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/failures.htm
Virtually everyone on HN knows how much of an obscene work-a-holic Steve Jobs was. He was also a first generation Syrian immigrant. Luck? He was fired as CEO from Apple before founding Pixar and NeXt. He still refused to give up. Grit doesn't mean being a work-a-holic though, it simply is extreme perseverance.
This inability to fail but sheer willpower is called grit. You're underestimating the power of raw unadulterated willpower if you take things outside of your comfort zone and to the extreme. Those people did, and your great grand children will likely hear their names.
Yet another take on Mark Cuban, Richard Branson, and Larry Ellison. The common thread in every one of these stories is grit, the inability to accept failure at face value and continue on until you succeed.
...and Wozniak was also lucky he met Jobs. So I'm not sure what the point is. The subtext sounds like you're bitter that it's hard to become a billionaire on the the basis of engineering skills alone, and that you don't value certain qualities in other people unless you perceive yourself as also having those qualities. I mean, it's not really subtext even, it's practically dripping from your words.
Why would I be bitter I am doing just fine thank you. But yes of course Wozniak was also lucky he met Jobs. That doesn't change anything about my point. It actually just proves it even more.
There was only one Wozniak in the world at that time, remember that very few people had that knowledge, time (being very young) and hands-on experience on electronics.
Since I am replying deep on this thread, I just want to say that Steve Jobs had also some rare skills but they were very lucky to meet in the world. I don't know of any other country, beyond UK (ARM/BBC/Acorn/Sinclair/Amstrad), where you can have this early access to computers and electronic components.
It's not nearly as much as an ordered process as you imply; the fact Woz was in his immediate environment was the reason they teamed. Jobs didn't go on a process of finding a technical cofounder.
This is known to be false. Wozniak and Jobs just happened to meet socially, and Jobs didn't know what was possible in computing until after he and Wozniak had already collaborated on other projects.
That is one point of view, but dare I say your understanding of luck is too all encompassing. Luck is really more of a probability, which can be explained mostly through an understanding of statistics. Steve Jobs wasn't lucky that he met Woz any more than Bill Gates was lucky for buying DOS for peanuts and then reselling it to IBM for many times more. Statistically, Steve would have met the right person if he tried hard enough, it just so happens he met Woz. Like I said previously, grit is one of the most common things (not the only) thing you'll find in successful people. If you get "lucky" that will certainly help, but it all comes down to intellect and drive (which we will call grit for this conversation). How many lottery winners or sportsball superstars end up broke 10 years later? They were lucky, what happened to them? They were idiots :)
You are confusing what you would like to be the case (that you can predict success purely by human factors) with what is the case (that success is also probatilistic.
To claim that it's to encompassing makes no sense. If you want to truly understand instead of chanting some simplistic catchprases we entrepreneurs like to tell us self then it cant be encompassing enough.
Life is mostly probatilistic and we have much less control of our lifes than we would like to tell ourselves and each other.
Meh. "Luck" isn't something you can count on, sustainably, over a period of time. You can be "lucky" (whatever that means) at a point in time, but that only gets you so far. Was billg lucky that IBM hired MS to provide an OS for the PC, and that he was able to acquire QDOS from SCP for dirt cheap? Sure... but can you attribute everything since then to a continued, non-stop string of lucky events?
Now, you might ask, "well, what if the DOS thing didn't happen?" And the thing is, we'll never know, because it did happen. But if you believe that gates, ballmer, allen, etc. were smart, hard-working and talented, it seems likely they would still have ultimately been "successful" in some fashion, even if the story unfolded quite differently.
Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful
I don't know if we'll ever be able to actually quantify and measure that, but my suspicion is that grit/perserverance/will are at least as important as luck and/or network.
But keep in mind, there are many levels of "success". Life isn't as binary as "wound up homeless and sleeping in a gutter" vs. "wound up a billionaire CEO".
You make the same mistake as many other in this thread do.
You confuse two different things.
The question being asked is whether grit is the one trait to rule them all.
My answer to that is no it's not because most people who are successful have grit (but far from all) and many people who have grit are not successful.
And so I introduce another element, luck. Luck is as you say not something you can count on which is the very point here and actually proves both my point but introduces another important one.
You can't copy someone for success. It's not just a matter of having grit it's a matter of being lucky and having grit.
I don't know of any rule or law that implies that something can only be true if you can count on it.
A lottery winner who might keep playing again and again and one day win the lottery have grit but it's still luck if they win.
The question being asked is whether grit is the one trait to rule them all.
That's not the question I was addressing. I was addressing the extent to which one can attribute someone's success to "luck", and I argue that both grit AND luck can matter to one's outcomes.
A lottery winner who might keep playing again and again and one day win the lottery have grit but it's still luck if they win.
That's not even remotely relevant, as a lottery is very specifically a game of chance. Life involves an element of things you can't control, but it also involves a lot of things you can.
There is some misinterpretation of what Duckworth is claiming. Her paper doesn't examine whether success is due to intrinsic or extrinsic aspects - whether luck is more important than grit - nor does it really examine the causes of success.
Her conclusion is "successful people have grit". Not that unsuccessful people don't have grit. Not that all people with grit are successful. Not that grit is the sole determining factor in success. Just that of the intrinsic attributes of successful people she examined, grit was common to all of them.
i.e. Some successful people are intelligent, but many aren't. Some successful people have an innate talent for the thing they are doing (however we define that), but many don't. All of them have grit.
Grit, here, is defined as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals". It borders on the obvious that people who are successful have perseverance and passion. But it also borders on the obvious that merely having perseverance and passion isn't enough to guarantee success.
the hole in this argument is that you need to know what to work hard on. the psych studies about 'praise kids for their work not their brains' seem legit as a way to improve test performance but school is scripted. In the real world success is based on how you navigate without a script, and persistence matters there but correct choices also matter.
Given an oracle that gives perfect advice of course hard work is the largest factor. That's the experiment being done in the test performance psych studies.
The 'deliberate practice' papers capture this best. The 'practice' half is hard work, but the 'deliberate' half is the ability to plan and analyze your training to advance your skills. With music or sports a coach can help you. With product, business or war (fields requiring strategy because the rules are ever-changing) not so much.
My favorite research on this topic is the 'fewer rules' study. I think it claims that families average 6 rules for children (bedtime etc) and having 2 or less is predictive for the children doing creative work as adults.
That's interesting. I have a daughter like that, she practically raises herself. On the other hand, I have another daughter who is extremely problematic and not even 1000 rules will suffice for her to behave.
This can also be a veiled tendency of manipulation. "You worked hard!" means "I am pleased you worked hard!" or "I will not be pleased if you don't work as hard in the future!" and this can have negative consequences as the kid realizes they are captive to your criteria.
The much touted ‘character hypothesis’ (which has become a staple of a lot of modern intellectual discourse around success, often heard from writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Paul Tough) is very useful, and speaks to an understanding of the greatly changed nature of success in the post-Industrial era. However, I think the qualities associated with that hypothesis should only be considered necessary, but not sufficient. To review, here is a list of qualities generally associated with it:
persistence
determination
self-control / the ability to delay gratification
abstention from substance use
curiosity
conscientiousness
self-confidence
(occasionally) emotional intelligence
good communication skills and a willingness to listen
grit
I’d personally add to the list ‘the willingness to always learn’ (i.e., be a dedicated autodidact for life.)
Based on what we’ve seen over the past ten years, especially with things like ‘the gig economy’ and our ‘free agent nation’, this hypothesis (perhaps model) holds up well. So what else is necessary? One or more of the following:
a strong personal safety net (savings and/or relatives and friends to fall back on)
good credentials
a strong personal / professional network
These last three are exactly the ones that are generally not available to those who need them most, even if they have all the qualities of the first list (you could also substitute ‘incredible luck’ for these three.) The idea that “men of enterprise are practically assured of success” is the kind of beautiful, romantic notion that periodically gets revived in America; the reality is different. We should remind ourselves that character alone may not be enough for success in today’s world for the even the most determined, confident, and gritty of people.
The rule of headlines aside, a lot of commenters are talking about survivorship bias with this. I think the best example of luck and grit is the Hass Avocado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hass_avocado#History
Hass was incredibly lucky to get that cultivar. From the seed growing at all, to being told to leave it be, to his children liking the taste, etc. Many many other growers at the Model Grocery Store were just as gritty and saw no real success in the Depression. He played his cards pretty well, all things considered, yet still died of a heart attack in 1952, the year his patent on the tree ran out. He was very very lucky, was pretty gritty, and still was a postman his whole life mostly by his own choice. He wanted a simple life and got one. I doubt he would have been so fortunate if lady luck had not smiled upon him.
Of course. Being born in a country with economic and educational advantages helps though. Being born into a family whose socio economic circumstances means you grow up expecting to be successful helps even more.
>And let me guess, each of them demonstrates "grit" and is extremely hard working/driven?
Not particularly so. Seems to me that there is a threshold of grit needed - that opens a lot of doors (incl 3rd world > 1st world moves) but beyond that its got diminishing returns.
My point is that the lottery of birthplace does matter but its not an automatic show-stopper.
Traits such as grit, hard work, determination, and luck are not the secret. They are the obvious ingredients.
But grit, hard work, and determination are also redundant for someone who possesses immense passion. Passion will make you gritty, hard working, and determined. It will keep you focused, and keep your mind on topic.
Luck is also redundant because it is unscientific and untraceable (it is metaphysical). In hindsight we love to say the stars aligned or that miracles happened, but from the perspective of the do-er, none of it really matters because you never count on luck. As an entrepreneur, you pay to roll the dice, and you simply continue to roll it until you get what you need, praying you'll get enough tries. An outsider may say you were determined and that you got lucky, but no. You were passionate, and just kept trying because you had no other choice. If anything, to not have a choice is the secret to success. Determined as in determinism, not emotion. Successful people were bound to be successful.
My father used to administer for a school which he was no longer proud to be a part of. He had a proposal for a new school and sent it to some people. Miraculously, he finds a sponsor, and his dream comes true. He tells me how lucky he was and how that event saved his life. But to that I say, "Well, who else was able to build a school from scratch, let alone an international school in Tokyo?" He may have been lucky, but he was also probably the only person standing on Earth that could have done what he could. He is passionate about education. Needless to say, he succeeded. http://newis.ed.jp/
My father is not an entrepreneur. But he had what it took to make things happen. And that's the secret to success. It's the ability to make things happen.
Success imho is the art of not fucking up any single aspect of what you're doing, plus doing some aspect really well. You can have a "lifestyle" (meaning you do pretty well, but not exceptional) job/business/... by simply not fucking up any of it.
Grit is like this : fuck it up and you're dead in the water, but you'll be fine at "normal" grit if you excel somewhere else. Exceptional grit is useless, counterproductive even, when for example market fit is not there at all. Or when the required knowledge simply isn't there.
The one exception I've seen in practice is that on rare occasions a particular combination of skills was a necessity to achieve exceptional success. But it sort of looks like equivalent to winning the lottery. It's never an obvious combination of skills that works like this, it's something stupid that you wouldn't normally combine, and that's exactly why it works. But there are a huge number of possible combinations, most are not worth anything exceptional.
I've always thought of it more like, there are some qualities that are conducive to success (like not giving up when things don't go your way), and there are qualities that make success less likely (illiteracy, poverty, geography, etc.), and of course there's an element of luck (the effect of which can be minimized with perseverance and continuous personal growth, but never fully eliminated). But in general, the only people who claim to have a secret to success are those selling books about it. :)
In fairness, the preceding paragraph would make a terrible name for a self-help book, so I can't really blame publishers either, which is why it's nice to have places like HN to talk about stuff like this.
...and it goes without saying that the word "success" is being used here as shorthand for "making lots of money", which is only one form of success and not the most important one in the grand scheme of things.
How many pop psychology article authors are millionaires?
If the writer of the article actually had the "secret to success" they would have been doing that instead of writing pop-psychology articles. There are even those who write articles titled "How to become rich like Mark Zuckeberg" or "How to raise the next M Z" (http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-raise-the-next-mark-zucke...)
Most of my 'succesful' peers seem to take the path of least resistance. I never feel fulfilled unless I'm doing things the hard way, to the point of self-sabotage.
And even ability to execute won't help you without the right social network.
It is extremely rare to see an actual individual being really successful. Most of the time, they are or were part of a company. This is because a person can only devote so much time and skill into anything.
And making the right connection is a matter of place (Ivy League anyone?), time (gold rush is good, recession is bad), interpersonal skills and finally luck.
Good executors do whatever it takes to get them where they need to go. If the right social network is important to their success they make it happen.
There are many exceptions to this rule that make this difficult (born into poverty or third world country, etc) but the great majority of people who complain, at least in the US, spend their evenings at happy hours and their weekends at the football game. You can't do that and then blame it on luck or bad circumstance. I work with hundreds of "entreprneurs" that spend weeks and months obsessing over logo design and color and UX, when they have zero customers at their door. Execution is a skill, it can be learned, and 99% of people just don't have it.
The most successful are generally the most resilient genetically. Nothing unreasonable about that. They also generally are the most intelligent or at least capable of problem solving and have symmetrical faces. Nothing really wrong with this except we're all lied to saying when someone is pretty they're usually crazy and things like that. It's all bullshit!
Although you're not the first to offer a (not-so-eloquent) genetic explanation of economic success, you are definitely the first person I came across being told "when someone is pretty they're usually crazy" which makes it a moot point.
If you look at the subset of people who enjoy "success" in life, a large number of them will display those qualitites, no doubt. But some of them could have attained it by sheer luck, filial connections, or others.
Now, if you look at the complementary subset (people who do not enjoy "success" in life), I guarantee you will find plenty of gritee people in there, in addition to people who display personal qualities not conducive to success (which by no mean excludes them from enjoying success in live, given the proper circumstances - see previous paragraph).
That's the aspect I do not enjoy about those "secret to success stories: no one ever considers the people who did everthing rigth, but did not succeed. It happen much more often than we think. No one cares for the losers, whatever the cause, alas. This is the 'survivorship paradox' described by Cicero... Taleb called it the Silent cemetary evidence.
One more aspect, if I may: when can one determine someone else is a "success", or a "failure"? People certainly are entitled to more than one shot at success, and negative results are certainly a valid way to pinpoint your path towards success.
So, grit is not THE secret path to success, but if your goal is to be successful, then internalising a gritee spirit certainly demultiply the possibilities to enjoy success.