Success and Failure


"Success is dangerous because often you don’t understand why you succeeded. You almost always know why you’ve failed"
-         Marc Pincus, CEO of Zynga

I liked the above quote the moment I read it. It took me a while, though, to realize that the statement reflects a philosophy as well. The same philosophy that it’s advocated in The Black Swan by Nicholas Nasim Taleb.

If you haven’t read the book, let me state the philosophy. It states that in an environment that has tens (if not hundreds) of variables, it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to identify why exactly someone succeeded. Or failed. It could be just simple luck at times. At others, you pick Reason X for your success when in reality it was Reason Y! Like, most people in IT were lucky: we graduated at the right time (post liberalization and post all the communication investments done by the West in the dot com era). But many IT guys will delude themselves into believing that they got rich because they were smart or worked hard. Sure, there’s that too, but if they had graduated 5 years earlier, all theirs smarts and hard work wouldn’t have made the slightest difference: they’d have most probably joined government jobs, the only ones available at that time.

Most people (not just IT folks), however, have trouble accepting this philosophy because of two reasons: first, it suits the ego to believe you are smart. And second, the idea that hard work (alone) produces success is drilled into most of us from a young age.

But all one has to do is just look around: if smarts were all it took to succeed, wouldn’t the same company being be Top Dog at everything? And yet, Reliance succeeded at oil but not telecom; Google succeeded at search but not social networking; Microsoft succeeded in the PC era but flopped in the smartphone world.

Or look it at from the other angle. It’s the question that Taleb worded so well as the title of a chapter in his other book, Fooled by Randomness: “If you are so rich why aren't you so smart?”

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