Come on, everyone knows that if you work really, really hard all your dreams come true because...magic? :p

Exactly.

There was another blog somewhere (I wanna say it was TLP, but maybe it was someone on Partial Objects) that reasoned that nobody wants to hear that success involves luck.

The successful people don't want to hear it because they can't stand the fact that they didn't have a hand in their own success. I mean, obviously work is a big part of it, but they have to believe that their hard work got them to where they are, not some chance encounter with another person that led to you meeting a potential investor or getting into your big-time job that led to your success.

And us peasants don't want to hear that luck is involved for exactly the reason you said: the fallacy that we're fed every day of our lives is that if we work hard and are good at our jobs and just stick with it... we'll be successful! All the sweat will be worth it and all the hard times and killing ourselves at our job will pay off and we'll have that huge house on 10 acres with a Bentley parked in the driveway. Or whatever your idea of success looks like.

Nobody wants to accept the fact that success has a pretty significant luck component involved.

Yeah, especially if you are talking about the more rare forms of success like being a big time actor, musician, or artist. There are a LOT of roadblocks that rely on you meeting the right person at the right time or making JUST the right impression on someone to get them to push things for you...otherwise, good luck with that. Heck, I actually know a fairly well known actor who had his entire career launched by a random encounter. :p

For somebody to become a billionaire, a thousand people have to fail to become millionaires. Or perhaps a million must be relegated to lives as mere thousandaires. Such talk is often brushed away with a careless, "The economy isn't a zero-sum game," but saying it doesn't make it so. There's only so much wealth created, and mechanisms are in place to ensure almost all of it goes to a very few entities. Even if wealth creation could be made nearly infinite, it would still all go to those same few and leave the rest of us just as we are now.

That's a bit of a digression from the main point, which I think is to try anyway, even though the odds are long. If you don't swing at all, you'll wind up spending your life as a pizza boy.

True... but consider the following...

a) The gist of the excerpt is that if you do swing and strike out... then what? If you can't make it doing what you love and you can't make it at a stress-filled job that will let you retire at 45... are you just doomed to a mediocre job making just enough to survive and looking at the possibility of retiring at 75, if things work out okay?

b) Something I've been considering a lot lately: what's wrong with being a pizza boy? Inevitably we're raised thinking we can be anything. And so when we find out we can't be an astronaut or a firefighter or a race car driver, there's a lot of disappointment involved. We look at the astronauts and firefighters and race car drivers and think, "Why not me?" But what if we were raised knowing we couldn't achieve those heights, but we could easily make a nice living doing a simple, quiet job? Following in our parents' footsteps?

'Course the problem now is that I can't even follow in my parents' footsteps anymore. That kind of living just doesn't exist anymore. A family of four living on a single mid-five-figure income? Pure fantasy.

There's nothing wrong with growing up to be a pizza guy, except I wound up in the 95th-98th percentile on all the college placement tests, and got straight 99's on the ASVAB. By all rights, I should have magically been able to write my own meal ticket somewhere, but I wound up being this instead, like an original Mickey Mantle baseball card folded up and used to shim a wobbly table leg.