<p><pre><code> I wonder: is there anything more predictive of success than being clever, brave, and persistent?
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Yes: wealth. That’s just an empirical fact, even if it’s an uncomfortable one that doesn’t help with individual ambition. If you think it’s tough for a poor malnourished kid with a single parent and bad schools to become a successful entrepreneur in America, you should see how tough it is for a kid born into a poor malnourished <i>nation</i>.<p>I also don’t buy the skill-will distinction at all, especially since they eventually say matters of will can be “practiced more intentionally”. The bones are there, but the details are kinda arbitrarily determined by ideological bias IMO. I think the author would love modern psychology lit on “Executive Functioning”, has a lot to say about how often a typical human is able to choose to will something!<p>Good article otherwise. Provocatively written, and refreshingly concise - def made me think. Also, obviously, inspiring!
To be successful you don't really need to be clever and you don't need to be brave.<p>You need to get lucky, and if that doesn't work, then yes persistence is the next most important thing – keep trying until you do get lucky.
I think cleverness simplifies what are arguably two different but somewhat related factors here.<p>An interest in a market/subject that has the potential for growth, and the ability to execute on said interest.<p>The first one probably has at least a bit of a luck element to it. If your interest ties into a hyped up technology or field (like with crypto a few years ago or AI recently) then opportunities for wealth open up left and right, while if your interests relate to something society/capitalism doesn't value as much, then you're out of luck. At least unless you can force yourself to change interests/passions.<p>You also need good timing, though you could make a good argument for that aspect being luck, skill or both.
This is missing one key attribute, which encompasses:<p>- mental flexibility / open-mindedness<p>- learning from others / humility<p>- seeking out breadth<p>- aggressively addressing blind spots, removing ignorance and correcting weaknesses by <i>constantly evolving to add new, orthogonal competencies.</i> (Note that you can bypass some of this work by working with people who have orthogonal competencies)<p>These traits are not captured by cleverness. You can be clever, brave and persistent but still fail by exploring too <i>narrowly</i>: applying a narrow range of techniques to a narrow range of problems which turn out to not admit any particularly fruitful paths.<p>Our brains tend strongly toward consistency (following the same cognitive grooves that we have previously etched in). We naturally shy away from things that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or that remind us of past failings. This tendency was probably useful in some evolutionary contexts but very clearly counterproductive when seeking sparse pockets of abundance in high dimensional spaces; cognitive dissonance is usually a strong sign that we have something valuable to learn, and thus dissonance should be <i>approached</i> with curiosity rather than avoided in a dismissive or fearful way. (In the ancient past, cognitive dissonance and unfamiliarity often meant there was a real chance of death if we proceeded in that direction!) Deliberately counteracting this tendency toward consistency, stubbornness and tunnel vision is a consistent theme among people from Charles Darwin to Charlie Munger. [0]<p>I would even bet that this attribute could replace a fair amount of cleverness. Someone who is persistent, brave, mentally flexible and who aggressively seeks out best practices from others will almost certainly be successful.<p>[0] An example from a book I read last week: the Google founders were initially stubborn about not putting ads on their site because of preconceived notions that ads would necessarily corrupt the integrity of search ranking. For a while they kept trying to make money by <i>licensing</i> search as a service to other businesses. This simply didn't work, and they were rapidly running out of the money necessary to buy the servers to keep scaling Google with the Web's growth. Fortunately they eventually bumped into Overture which was pioneering pay-per-click advertising. They studied the business model open-mindedly and found a number of distasteful things, but they also saw that these were false fails. More importantly they realized that 1) that business model actually works, 2) Google could maintain search integrity by simply displaying a clear boundary between ads and normal search results, and 3) they could provide real value by returning ads for items and information that people actually wanted based on their search results, and 4) they could avoid the pop-ups and obnoxious banner ads that they detested and keep the search UI clean and respectful. "To their eternal credit, Larry and Sergey both lighted on what was happening with [Overture's] business model and came to understand pretty rapidly what an attractive business that was...it made sense to go where the money was being spent. And it was being spent in the advertising business much more readily than in the licensing business." (<i>The Google Story</i>, p.87-89) There are a number of good lessons in here: the value of aggressively seeking breadth in exposure, learning from others' discoveries, open-mindedness over stubbornness, and the fact that if you view something as a huge tradeoff you are probably just not being creative enough.