I think part of what you're calling luck is what pg calls natural ability and part of it is the idea of "luck favors the prepared". I don't see how you can attribute luck to Lionel Messi's success, with his natural ability+hard work there's no way he wouldn't have been discovered and achieved success.
Hard work is necessary but not sufficient. I agree that the essay glosses over the element of luck that is involved, but I don't think that makes the rest of what Paul is saying wrong. Even if hard work alone doesn't always lead to success, not working hard guarantees that you won't be exceptional.
What about intelligence and being able to notice emerging trends? Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s? Or did they see what was going on at Xerox PARC and the coming PC revolution? Their less lucky colleagues stayed in college and went on to have normal careers.
Those are important, but nearly as much as luck. Without the luck he had in terms of timing and location it is absolutely not clear that Gates (or Jobs) would have been as successful.
This is a simple empirical observation: there are many individuals who are both more intelligent than and harder working (in the sense of this article) than Gates or Jobs and who never come to within a tenth of their success. That’s 100% luck in action.
Could Gates have been a success without intellect and hard work? Probably not. Could a number of others who were more intelligent or harder working have succeeded if they instead were in Gates’ position? Almost certainly.
Technology is littered with failed experiments, not always for hard work or technical reasons. Remember Xanadu? How about Transmeta? For each Jobs or Gates, there's probably 20 of them out there who ended up having more normal careers simply due to luck.
> Do you think Jobs and Gates were simply lucky in the early 80s?
This seems like luck to me[1]:
> [Mary Maxwell Gates'] tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member, and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.
Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.
Noticing "emerging trends" is also likely to not have been 100% due to Jobs/Gates attentiveness. If you heard about it from a friend of a friend, that's extremely lucky.
This is all also in hindsight. Of course it looks like they knew exactly what they were doing, because they succeeded. Other people were not so lucky.
> Intelligence is genetic, which you have no control over.
So is all of evolution, but then you still have adaptation. There is a skill to noticing opportunities and having the fortitude to take the risk. Not everyone does that.
It does not in any way agree with me. I am saying luck is important. If that's anywhere in there, I missed it.
> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?
Hard work is not the distinguishing characteristic. Luck is. Why promote hard work? Because someone else is working hard for your benefit.