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.
> But for us normal people who aren't giants, luck will be needed to find just the right conditions to get published.
Much like some forms of the web startup, barriers to entry are much lower or gone for publishing. Amazon's KDP is free to publish to, and you can get formatting, a cover image and some editing done fairly cheap.
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.