This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.
Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.
And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.
I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.
But how many other people had similar luck and did nothing with it?
Luck is another word for opportunity. Some people are really good at leveraging opportunity for all it's worth. Most of us (myself very much included) are not.
Case in point: I'm the same age as Mark Zuckerberg. Many people say his age is why he was able to be at the right place at the right time to create Facebook. Much like they say about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and every other "self-made" billionaire.
But he still had to choose to do all the right things that I chose not to do in order to be able to experience that kind of luck.
At some point we gotta own up to our own role in guiding our lives.