I had a professor who had the class stand up and all start flipping coins. If you flipped tails you sat down and stopped. After several iterations he interviewed the last remaining standing person to ask him what hard work he did to become such a good coin flipper, and if he had any secrets about coin flipping success he wanted to share with the class. It was a pretty nice exercise and I think applicable generally to…
This example looks really good at a superficial level, until you dig down into the math. For me to consider someone a really good coin-flipper, he'd have to get at least 10 heads in a row. Even on this measly example, you would need 1024 people in the room to get at least one successful person. It's reasonable to assume that becoming successful in business requires you to make more than 20 correct decisions, and depe…
Two people could have equal ability to make decisions - some good, some bad. In some fields of endeavor, they might succeed about equally.
But in startupland, it's easy for one wrong decision to kill the business, so they are removed from ever trying again. Or one right decision could cause them to experience accelerating returns – which compensates for all the other dumb mistakes, and eventually kills off their competitors.
So, paradoxically, the more cutthroat the environment, and the more exponential the possible returns, the less we can use survivorship as evidence of superior skill.
Note that I'm not saying a successful businessperson is unskilled. It's just that it's not conclusive evidence of superior skills.