I think it's more about being 'mentally prepared'. A lot of 'successful' people are harping on this thought that as long as you work hard you can accomplish something similar to what they have, which might trick a lot of people into actually believing this, not taking into account the substantial contribution 'luck' has.

In many ways, this train of thought is also abused by those who have already made it. Help the poor? Why, they're not working hard enough! Thus, helping everyone be aware of this could conceivably help us make better social policies.

>What else would you do instead?

Acknowledge when luck was the major reason for your success. Don't stand in front of a room of people and tell them if they weren't so damn lazy, they could have hundreds of millions of dollars as well.

In other words, if luck played any major part in your success, you really have no justification in lecturing people on how to be good at something.

While luck will definitely have played a non-trivial role in any meaningful "made it" success story, it's equally disingenuous to ascribe success to luck alone. Never leaving your comfort zone, never taking a chance, never accepting that improving yourself will often require hard work and real sacrifice and never venturing out into the world all but guarantees that you will never get lucky. Casually explaining away all success as random luck is also pretty likely to ensure that it will never happen.

No, theres no silver bullet, especially not in small/easy/silly lifestyle variations (meditation, eating granola, not having furniture etc), but then that's far from what most inspirational business stories are about.

That's the same point I tried to make in another comment. Of course luck plays a role to some degree. But this obsession over luck as the key to the success of others seems unhealthy to me. Just from my position as a person approaching 50, it seems that it's an obsession that dominates more in the upcoming generations than in ones past where the mantra that "hard work leads to success" was a lot more common.

Once you take on the mindset that all success is luck, what's the motivation for trying at all?

I think you misunderstood me. I am not "successful" in that sense. By "you" I meant us "unsuccessful" people who are the target of such "success stories". What are we supposed to do? I'd say it's waste of time to get too pissed at success stories that are affected by survivorship bias.

It doesn't mean you should be mad, just rejecting the fluffy business success thinking and think more deeply about how your personal situation is and is not the same as the person giving the optimistic take and making decisions with some thoughts about the likely outcome.

Consider Bill Gates: by all accounts, he was a good programmer and willing to work long hours. Over the years I've heard a lot of people talk about that without also acknowledging things like the starting advantage of coming from a wealthy family and making his first big sale when his mother was on IBM's board, and the luck of starting a business just as the industry was making a huge change which upset a lot of established players.

That doesn't mean you need to hate him or say his success was undeserved – ignoring the later anti-trust actions – but it does say that for most of us the more realistic model would be, say, Gary Kildall. That also says that e.g. many people might reasonably conclude that a career at a large corporation which gives them some interesting technical work and leaves them with time to spend on their family, personal health, open-source projects or other hobbies, etc. is actually a better deal than a stressful attempt at something which might pay somewhat but not game-changingly more but also has a number of likely outcomes which aren't as good.

>What else would you do instead?

Not instead, but in parallel: check cases of those who failed in the same area and lost it all / went to jail / broke their life, among with less stressful outcomes. Bad thing is, losers rarely write success stories, so there is always a big risk in "being like Gates or Jobs".

>What else would you do instead?

A single lucky person is a small sample, so statistically insignificant.

What would be better is to be able to see what all people did, the ones who failed, and the ones who succeeded, and then try to draw conclusions from there.

Unrealistic for sure, but that's what I'd prefer doing instead.

Try to differentiate between what is necessarily and what is sufficient. You might have to work and hard to succeed but that sure as hell isn't the entire equation.