There's an interview with Bo Burnham where he puts it clearly...
> Don't listen to people who just got very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to "follow your dreams" is like a lottery winner saying "liquidise your assets, buy Powerball tickets. It works!"
And that's the thing. Skill and talent are important, but there's a certain amount of success that's only achievable through luck, or through starting from _so far ahead_ that it's just genuinely out of reach for us mere mortals.
Is the experience of those people irrelevant? No, but it's also not actually applicable to most other people.
Surely there's some luck involved, but wouldn't the Taylor Swift analogy be more like "develop a product that leverages your talents and is likely to have mass appeal, work your ass off perfecting your ability to deliver that product, take the extreme negative externalities of success in your business without complaining, and once you get traction double down on the working your ass off part?" Oh and also "have sufficient business acumen to stare down Apple and win?"
> Don't listen to people who just got very lucky. Taylor Swift telling you to "follow your dreams" is like a lottery winner saying "liquidise your assets, buy Powerball tickets. It works!"
And that's the thing. Skill and talent are important, but there's a certain amount of success that's only achievable through luck, or through starting from _so far ahead_ that it's just genuinely out of reach for us mere mortals.
Is the experience of those people irrelevant? No, but it's also not actually applicable to most other people.