[jocaal]

Past a certain point, skill doesn't contribute to the magnitude of success and it becomes all luck. There are plenty of smart people on earth, but there can only be 1 founder of facebook.

[vovavili]

Plenty of smart people prefer not to try their luck, though. A smart but risk-avoidant person will never be the one to create Facebook either.

[estearum]

Plenty of them do try and fail, and then one succeeds, and it doesn't mean that person is intrinsically smarter/wiser/better/etc than the others.

There are far, far more external factors on a business's success than internal ones, especially early on.

[dgfitz]

What risk was there in creating facebook? I don't see it.

Dude makes a website in his dorm room and I guess eventually accepts free money he is not obligated to pay back.

What risk?

[miki123211]

I view success as the product of three factors, luck, skill and hard work.

If any of these is 0, you fail, regardless of how high the other two are. Extraordinary success needs all three to be extremely high.

[whodidntante]

There is another dimension, which is mostly but not fully characterized as perseverance, but many times with an added dose of ruthlessness

Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, google and many others all had strong doses of ruthlessness

[benterix]

Or you can just have rich parents and do nothing, and still be considered successful. What you say only applies to people who start from zero, and even then I'd call luck the dominant factor (based on observing my skillful and hardworking but not really successful friends).

[nirav72]

>luck, skill and hard work.

Another key component is knowing the right people or the network you're in. I've known a few people that lacked 2 of those 3 things and yet somehow succeeded. Simply because of the people they knew.