
How To Succeed - davidw
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-succeed.html
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wccrawford
He talks a lot about luck, but I think the better your skills, the less luck
you need.

I've noticed that the great writers don't talk about luck, but they DO talk
about writing a lot before they got published. I just looked up Stephen King
and he started avidly writing at 12, started sending to magazines at 16, and
got published when he was 20. That's a lot of writing. Source:
<http://www.horrorking.com/interview9.html>

But for us normal people who aren't giants, luck will be needed to find just
the right conditions to get published.

I do think this somewhat applies to programming as well, especially game
programming. You can't just jump in and have your first game be an overnight
success. You need to practice for a while, write some mediocre games, and then
finally get your stride and start turning out gold. Luck is still needed,
though.

Minecraft is a good example. It was a relatively unknown game. Then one day it
got published in a magazine, the internet got ahold of it, and it blew up. It
was still exactly the same game as the previous week, but now it was popular
and famous and selling like hotcakes. Not that it wasn't a good game... But
without luck (getting published in a magazine) it wasn't going anywhere.

~~~
argonz
Absolutely agree, in the case of Minecraft luck was important.

With fat tails anything can happen, partly because luck, most of the
explanations are just hindsight bias.

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marcin
This piece particurarly reflects the tech startup world:

"You can quit if you want to. Or you can stick with it until you get lucky.

The are no easy answers. No quickie fixes. No direct paths to success.

No one is forcing you to do this. You have to love it, and to believe in
yourself. Even when you fail.

Especially when you fail.

If you aren't failing, you aren't trying hard enough.

And if you aren't trying hard, it's going to take a lot longer to get lucky."
Everyone say ROVIO and a hundred others.

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davidw
It's about publishing, but a lot of the advice makes sense to me. That
industry too, is made up of a lot of big hits and a long tail.

