Luck seems to come around… in time.

I think sometimes success in life is from making a series of "right decisions" when those forks in the road come along. (And not fucking up when you do in fact luck onto the right path.)

Success is almost always a combination of both. No one is self-made but that tends to irk people who believe they are because they've spent years doing a lot of hard work. Without that hard work they'd have failed! Yet hard work alone is not sufficient.

Where you grow up, what schools you attend, who your childhood friend group is, luckily not getting hit by a bus and put in the hospital, etc. A whole host of factors conspire to grant or deny you opportunities.

However once the opportunity arises you have to seize it. Many people have lots of opportunity yet accomplish nothing because they lack the skills, will, or both to do so. Conversely many people with the drive and skills never hit the right opportunity and end up nowhere.

For whatever reason the broader culture seems to bounce back and forth between both extremes. The whole "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "get a job you lazy bum" crowd acting as if you can get rich purely with hard work. Then on the other side there seems to be this well-intentioned idea on the left that if we simply give every under-privileged kid opportunity they'll be successful.

Real humans and real lives are far more complex than such simple notions.

I’m correctly estimating my own effort in my success. I know just how hard I worked. Making the right childhood best friend causally set me on the path to do it.

PhDs are valued by idiot politicians, low bar

Here's Daniel Lemire dunking on PhDs: https://x.com/lemire/status/2082851447499088173

Lemire in part claims:

"For social reasons, it is highly uncommon for people to fail the oral defense of their thesis. Some people are just terrible at it, naturally. They cannot think well on their feet. They get confused and answer the wrong question."

The fraction of your 1% with the credentials to be on the panel just hands them out regardless as a consolation prize.

Who is gonna be able to challenge them. Except on the whole being 1 of billions like everyone else.

It's social status moat chasing.

>You've picked that right friend and you've earned that one friend, and you've kept that one friend for ages.

Well I never had the opportunity to meet that friend. I would have been a good friend to them and kept them for ages, but because of circumstances beyond my control, I never even had the opportunity to do so. Kind of seems like a good way to sum up that notion would be to say that the OP was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time, no?

>If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.

But why would they do the exact opposite of what the OP did? If it turned out so well for the OP, why wouldn't others also want to do the same thing to end up with the same results?

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

I don’t agree with this at all.

A lot of the decisions that define us for our entire life are made when we are at our dumbest, or at least most impulsive: our teenage years.

I, like many (most?) teenage boys, really wanted girls to like me, and I didn’t have a lot of luck asking girls out in high school [1]. If a girl that I thought was cute had offered to hang out with me and tried to get me to do drugs, there’s a decent chance I would have done it. If they had gotten me to do the really scary stuff like heroin or meth who knows how different (and probably worse) my life could have been?

[1] To be clear, I am not an incel; the girls were always actually very nice in declining me and obviously even if they weren’t it’s not like I was entitled to a girlfriend.

I think the idea is simply to give everyone the same opportunity. "Fairness" then rests with them.

Whatever strawman you’re fighting here, it ain’t me.