Putting aside the fact that the article explicitly agrees with you that just hard work isn't enough, here's the part of your comment I don't understand:
> I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money.
Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?
Of course hard work matters, but when VC tells you to work hard, take it with the grain of salt, because this is how VC is going to make money off your work. What is missing from this advice is what is sacrificed. If and when 10-20 year later you cash out, what else are you going to have beside money? Family, friends, health? If you can make this trade-off consciously - good for you, but most people just go with the flow and don't think about it until it's too late.
Double irony of this advice is that many VCs are one of the most laid-back people you can meet. Usually they are already rich, so they don't exactly have to hussle anymore, and can choose when to do so.
You are waisting your breath trying to convince the fanboys here. Their brain cannot grasp the concept that the VC just wants to make money.
To the VC, investing in a startup is equivalent to buying a very out of the money call option. Option theory tells us these are ultra low premium but have immensive upside, so the payoff for the VC is ultra convex and non linear: from 1000 startups, 10 get more than 10 mil valuation, and maybe 1 is a unicorn (i’m making the numbers up but u get the idea). So yes Mr Graham would love for all of the fanboys to work hard since they are literally just options to him, and he has nothing to lose apart from small options.
On the flip side, startup owners are then underwriting options in the form of their life and work, so must be short volatility.
Long story short: dont do startups thinking you will win, think the VC will win
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.
> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?
Hard work doesn’t matter (at least to the extent pg posits) and they promote it because (surprise!) they’re not all knowing entities but humans with flaws (yes even successful people can hold views that are not correct).
Hard work matters exactly as much as the dozen other factors but when you are busy working hard you don't think about those. It goes both ways. If those factors are in your favor you don't talk about them, when they are not, you pretend that they don't matter because hard work is above everything else.
> Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter?
Hard work matters. But it isn't enough. Luck is needed to transform hard work into wealth. Line cooks work very hard.
Incidentally, YC's business model positions it extremely well vs. other VCs to take advantage of this calculus. Fund 1000s of startups full of maniacally hard working kids, and you can expect a few to also get lucky just by sheer volume. Whereas if you're only funding a few startups they may work equally as hard and never run into the luck required to succeed.
> I know the VC thing about the importance of hard work. They love to promote hard work because that's how they make money.
Why would they promote hard work if hard work didn't matter? And if it does matter, then what exactly is your problem with what pg is saying?