alt Hacker NewsI attribute 90% of my success in life to the fact that I happened to make the right childhood best friend. One thing led to another and I got a PhD and earn [unreasonable salary]/year now. Life is insanely unfair. On some level it is luck. I don’t know what the “skill issue” twitterites don’t get about it.
(Hard work doesn’t hurt, either, but that goes without saying.)
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My whole life would have been different if I didn’t get a new physics teacher when I was 16?
Before him, I found math and physics unintuitive, but he explained it in a way that (to me) made the whole high school physics trivial.
I studied physics at the university where I learned programming, and switched to software engineering.
Given only like 1% of people hold PhDs i feel like you're massively underestimating your own effort in your success.
Life it not unfair. You've picked that right friend and you've earned that one friend, and you've kept that one friend for ages.
If someone does exact opposite of what you've did, than it's not unfair he's doing worse than you do.
In order to make life fair, it is necessary to hammer everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
~99% of my success is that I happened to make friends with the right coworker at my first job, who happened to be a genius, and happened to refer me to better places. Otherwise, I'd still probably be making 1/4th of what I'm making now - simply because I didn't go to the right schools or be born to the right family, etc.
I think Thinking Fast and Slow talks a lot about maximizing your surface area for luck.
Nothing beats luck.
Sorry to all the unlucky people. I wish you could all be lucky, too!