Comments by "L.W. Paradis" (@l.w.paradis2108) on "Is Success Luck or Hard Work?" video.

@mortkebab2849 So . . . Isn't it a matter of being unlucky, for everyone who encountered your comments on this thread? Especially since we are here watching videos on science and mathematics, which does require a modicum of effort, say, by comparison to watching cute babies and animals? Isn't everyone's life just the tiniest bit less happy, all because we read your posts? Sheer bad luck. Trivial in itself, but consider the aggregate. Especially these days.
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@Chungustav Not a Jewish belief at all. More like a corrupted version of Calvinism.
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@mercyjohnson6436 Sigh. Blocked.
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Were you prepared to be born? Were you prepared to be born where you would speak English?
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@mercyjohnson6436 Your Bible doesn't have this? "I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
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@mercyjohnson6436 If you believe in revealed religion, then perhaps it was god who chose not to reveal himself to some people. Faith may not be a "choice" like any other.
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@lukea977 You worked on your parents' marriage? Did you start at birth, or sooner?
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@quietobserver5480 I took it to mean that the agricultural revolution occurred 12000 years ago, while the industrial revolution is at most 300 years old, and mass literacy even more recent. There just were more farmers in human history, and so often today you see brilliant people emerge from families that only recently left the land. On the other hand, something happens in urban centers that is unusual, with sudden, immense spurts of creativity, and cities (though not like contemporary cities) certainly predate industrialization by millenia. Anyway, that was what I thought he meant. (?)
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Luck is no sudden Category 1 storm. Luck is not having a father who set sail with you when the weather was "a little choppy," and jeered at you for crying. Am I lucky to have imagination? It's not evident.
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@davemwangi05 You beat me to it.
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@likhithravi2797 Who said anything about money? It's very unlucky to live in a society where people always and only think in terms of money.
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@garglemuh2813 We are unlucky in the comments this great video seems to have attracted.
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@AndrewDavidBoyd I didn't mean to say it was "enough." I meant no one planned for these sorts of events, or prepared for them. Most of the most important things in life, good and bad, simply happen. Having parents who loved each other, stayed married, and lived until you turned 50 or older, is another example. Having a sister you get along with is known to be a bulwark against clinical depression.
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Sure. There were so many farmers, and for millennia.
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@djddm8760 Read some real biographies of truly great people. I don't mean some rich guy, I mean a Martha Argerich, or a J. M. Coetzee, or a Picasso, or a Bette Davis, or Miles Davis. Find out that they had broke absolutely every "rule" you could imagine, and that a good many years of their lives were, by conventional measures, a mess. Well, I'm inspired, anyway. "Make no small plans" is about the only cliche I like. You haven't noticed that the self-help genre, especially on the subject of making money, is propaganda? It's telling you what the current elite wants you to do. I mean, that's useful to know. :D
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That's got to be the worst book I ever read, LOL.
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Actually, based on Martin Seligman's research, believing you are in complete control of your destiny could backfire. It's often advantageous to see setbacks as weird bad luck that happened at random, but that you can now analyze dispassionately for information, almost as if it had little to do with you.
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If you teach college kids, try this experiment: ask them if they think they could become multimillionaires. All of them do, and they'll be furious if you give them any impersonal descriptions of economic forces that might suggest not. (After all, "attracting abundance" might be true -- kind of a primitive Pascal's wager they've got going.) Now, give them a challenge: take a year of Calculus and get an A on every exam. Hmm. Or, for a whole month, cook everything you eat. You will hear groans. No one has ever leaped to take on the challenge and achieved it. If becoming a multimillionaire is easier, how can it be based solely on hard work?
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@davemwangi05 Don't worry. He'll never read The Jakarta Method, for example. Those of us who have know we are lucky it was written. Journalists get killed for less.
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@cijeel3975 One percent of Bezo's wealth puts a person into the billionaire class. One one-hundredth of one percent (0.01%) is plenty. With prudence, you and your children can almost certainly have basic necessities covered, for life.
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You forgot viciousness.
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@davidabulafia7145 The more skill and hard work, the more unwanted attention by those who seek to pull you down. Whether they can is mostly a matter of luck. Too bad no one in America reads The Apology of Socrates. It's all there, 2400+ years ago.
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So someone's Bible doesn't contain Ecclesiastes 9: 11? Was it censored?
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Hard work in the wrong context can harm you, too. You've never been in a office where hard work is so resented that people actually try to trip you up? Or where an incompetent supervisor imagines you are after her job? (A classic pattern in employment discrimination cases.) It is very important to be in a context where your work matters, to "find the right pond." That is always partly luck.
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@m4l490n It was luck in reference to him, the son. The son was a child, he couldn't control whether the parents he was born to valued books.
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@ggh_-ts6pn When in fact viciousness plays a role.
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But the simulation he did showed that all of the qualified applicants who were rejected -- a very large number -- were simply unlucky.
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@Александр Кузнецов I'm sorry you don't know how to do computer simulations. Maybe if you work harder at it, or if someone suggested the right book to you, you could replicate the data for yourself and feel pride instead of phony tough-guy scorn.
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@bwake Well, the people I replied to have since left the discussion, so I don't know what this was about.
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If you teach college kids, try this experiment: ask them if they think they could become multimillionaires. All of them do, and they'll be furious if you give them any impersonal descriptions of economic forces that might suggest not. (After all, "attracting abundance" might be true -- kind of a primitive Pascal's wager they've got going.) Now, give them a challenge: take a year of Calculus and get an A on every exam. Hmm. Or, for a whole month, cook everything you eat. You will hear groans. No one has ever leaped to take on the challenge and achieved it. If becoming a multimillionaire is easier, how can it be based solely on hard work?
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:D Are you multilingual or non-Western? If neither, that's both expected and bloody funny.
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:D On second thought, thanks for writing this. I have several excellent comments on this video I had forgotten about, and enjoyed rereading.
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@wouldbabyhitlerkillyou4217 You think? Yet not one of them has posted a solid, reasoned critique of any element of it. What are the chances that they are all too busy to toss off a few cogent lines? I guess we are unlucky that they haven't seen fit to share their knowledge with us. P. S. Thank you for swearing. Swearing is information: don't bring up this video at parties, or at work, etc., at least not without being prepared to elicit hostility. Most people know not to, but just in case a few optimists might be tempted, you provided the corrective.
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Only the lucky ones.
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@AndrewDavidBoyd If no one ever spoke English to you, you would never acquire it at all.
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