In the startup world there’s a similar notion. Starting a successful business can seem impossible, and many of the big successes depend to a certain extent on luck. It’s hard to control for having the right idea at the right time, and people who do manage to do this are usually lucky rather than good at having the right idea at the right time, and only believe otherwise due to survivorship bias.
But the reality of what you can do to make a business succeed or fail is not in having the right idea, but what we might call the right effort. It’s putting in the work, having the grit to keep going, and building the skills to improve your baseline chances of success.
Put another way, you can’t make yourself lucky, but you can make yourself prepared to take advantage of luck when it appears so as not to fail to take advantage of an opportunity presented to you.
I think this same idea translates back into EA. There’s a lot of unseen work that goes into improving the world. It’s easy to look at someone who is already having impact and all the things they did and the conditions they found themselves in that made it possible for them to have impact and feel like it would be impossible for you to do that yourself, but actually they did it and so can you, it just takes a lot of work and a willingness to put in years of work to make yourself ready to achieve something.
I think a useful framing is to see the grit and determination to keep going as the real heroism, not the highly visible stuff that gains you accolades or is causally near impact.
I think this is a great point.
In the startup world there’s a similar notion. Starting a successful business can seem impossible, and many of the big successes depend to a certain extent on luck. It’s hard to control for having the right idea at the right time, and people who do manage to do this are usually lucky rather than good at having the right idea at the right time, and only believe otherwise due to survivorship bias.
But the reality of what you can do to make a business succeed or fail is not in having the right idea, but what we might call the right effort. It’s putting in the work, having the grit to keep going, and building the skills to improve your baseline chances of success.
Put another way, you can’t make yourself lucky, but you can make yourself prepared to take advantage of luck when it appears so as not to fail to take advantage of an opportunity presented to you.
I think this same idea translates back into EA. There’s a lot of unseen work that goes into improving the world. It’s easy to look at someone who is already having impact and all the things they did and the conditions they found themselves in that made it possible for them to have impact and feel like it would be impossible for you to do that yourself, but actually they did it and so can you, it just takes a lot of work and a willingness to put in years of work to make yourself ready to achieve something.
I think a useful framing is to see the grit and determination to keep going as the real heroism, not the highly visible stuff that gains you accolades or is causally near impact.