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Originally Posted by you&me
This is absolutely ridiculous.
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Not at all. You should re-read the post I was responding to and my full response to it instead of taking one sentence out of context to make an argument against.
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The number of people that achieve any meaningful level of success, despite not being naturally smarter and / or more productive than others are the exception. A complete anomaly. A fluke.
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Opportunity matters. Some people don’t get the same opportunities as others regardless of how intelligent or productive they are. It’s really that simple. A company could make a clone of their CEO to be an exact match in every way, but only one of them will be able to be the CEO of that company despite being identical candidates because the opportunity would not be there for both.
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Telling yourself otherwise might be comforting ("he's not smarter than me, he's just luckier" or "She doesn't work harder than me, I just got a ####ty break"), but that's all it is.
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I wish I could pretend things like nepotism and economic barriers didn’t exist.
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Through my career and work experience, I'm fortunate enough to meet and interact with a lot of very successful people, like the top 1% of the 1%. I can say, without exception, than none of the people I know in this group are anything but exceptionally intelligent and (at least and one point in their lives) highly productive. I'm sure some of them have been extremely lucky and some of them might be ####ty people, but none of them are anything less than intelligent and hard working.
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What does this have to do with what we’re discussing? I haven’t stated that people who are successful aren’t hardworking or intelligent. I was arguing against Dirac’s position that successful people are successful because they are naturally smarter and more productive than the population at large because it ignores a number of factors that can contribute to or limit success.
Top 1% or the 1% eh? If you happen to run into Galen Weston jr would you mind asking him if he beat out all other candidates to become CEO of Loblaws due to his intelligence and productivity or if there were other factors involved and let us know what he says? You can do the same if you happen to run into Ivanka Trump as well.
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I think most in this conversation seem to agree that there are a number of factors that contribute to overall success. I suppose opinions will vary when it comes to the degrees of importance of those factors, but (IMO), the single greatest common factor when it comes to determining success is intellect.
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I don’t disagree that it is a very important factor, and it may be the most important one.