
Winning Attitude, Losing Attitude - randall
http://areallybadidea.com/winning-attitude-losing-attitude
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timr
Essential missing detail: what are the "loser" person's other opportunities?
It's one thing if they're sitting around playing video games all day long and
squandering their life. It's an _entirely different thing_ if they're already
doing relatively well at something else.

The point is that opportunity cost makes a huge difference in the final
analysis. The friend with no college degree and no programming skill had very
little to lose from the start. But if the "loser" friend is earning a
substantial salary and stock options somewhere, the barrier to risky
speculative bets is correspondingly higher.

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gerner
It's great to hear these stories of success. And yes, it seems like a positive
attitude is critical to success, rather than looking for reasons not to do
something.

However, this kind of over the shoulder throw at "what it takes to succeed"
seems pretty shallow. I'd rather hear about what really made these two people
different. How the one overcame the actual challenges s/he encountered and the
other did not.

Maybe the key difference between these two people is that the one tried and
the other didn't. But this article doesn't really make that argument.

OTOH, I don't have 2 million in annual revenue at the moment :)

~~~
drblast
The difference is one person tried to do something, and the other didn't try
at all. The one who tried succeeded.

Which makes the whole point irrelevant and illogical. If you want to prove
that a "winning attitude" is the key to success, you'd want to compare people
who actually tried to do something and who had opposing attitudes and see how
they ended up.

Extra points if you do this with enough people to make the results
statistically significant.

Please, everyone realize that this argument is logically identical to the
original blog post:

I have two friends, one who has blond hair and the other is a redhead. The
blond guy always talks about hunting lions in Africa but has never gone on
safari. My redhead friend, on the other hand, went to Africa and shot a lion
on his first try. It just goes to show you how important it is to have red
hair.

That's a BS argument, no? But if you said, "I did a study of 10,000 people who
went to Africa and tried to shoot a lion, and red hair correlated with a
successful kill more than any other characteristic by a wide margin," then you
might want to consider dying your hair with henna before you go try to shoot a
lion.

