
Calling Steve Jobs ‘Lucky’ Would Be A Sin - npguy
http://statspotting.com/2012/12/calling-steve-jobs-lucky-would-be-a-sin/
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jacques_chester
Steve Jobs was born in the USA. Massive edge right there.

Lived in California during the dawn of the personal computing age.

Met Woz.

These 3 coincidences put him ahead of billions of other people. And they _are_
coincidences. They're luck.

Luck matters; we just don't like to admit it --
<http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/>

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ziffusion
Good lord. There's gotta be some logical fallacy named after this.

Yes, all these things happened by some fortunate cosmic happenstance. But that
is true for _everything_. Take away a few key pieces from a flow in history,
and the flow might not have taken place at all.

The point is that, statistically, such fortunate confluences happen all the
time. Only a few produce a flow that blazes a trail. And it does have a lot to
do with the characteristics of the people who find themselves at the cusp of
it.

Could someone else have been as successful as Steve had these early things
happened to them? Maybe, maybe not.

Could someone else have been as successful as Steve had some other set of
fortunate events come together? Maybe, maybe not.

It is silly to take away from a person, and attribute it all to luck.

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jacques_chester
> _It is silly to take away from a person, and attribute it all to luck._

And where, exactly, did I do that?

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ksec
You can win three times Lottery Jackpot and you still wouldn't create a damn
thing that is anywhere near Apple's Product. Not that they are insanely great,
but no one would put label them as cheap, crap or mindlessly crafted.

And you can met Woz, but you would still have failed creating a company. And
properly failed miserably.

Steve Lived at the dawn of the personal computing age, and got kicked butt by
IBM, M$ and Intel. Wow. Lucky

He got kicked out of his own founding company. Extremely Lucky.

There are properly some luck involved in every successful billionaires, Bill
Gate for exmaple. But Steve, I would put him as the last one on the list.

So Yes. It is a Sin.

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jacques_chester
I believe that being born in the USA, being in California and meeting Woz were
all _necessary_ causes. Without them Steve Jobs might have run an insanely
great yoga studio.

So yeah. Luck.

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lutze
I've heard Jobs called a lot of things over the years (mostly the C word, if
we're honest), but lucky? As in "merely" lucky? Nah.

The guy had a head on his shoulders, you've got to give him that.

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olgeni
These kind of debates are so boring they actually make you appreciate reading
VB code.

~~~
general_failure
Surely, you meant J2EE?

~~~
olgeni
Nope, nobody deserves that much.

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tthomas48
Don't mess with the narrative. If hard work isn't the only thing that
contributes to success you're going to destroy a lot of people's entire world
view. But yes he was lucky. Just like the fact I'm a programmer right now has
a lot to do with being lucky that my accountant father brought home an IBM PC
from work in 1980. The choice to actually spend time learning how the computer
worked, while an important choice, was secondary to the luck in being one of a
fairly small number of people with a personal computer in 1980.

