Unfortunately, most proverbs, sayings, etc. have no quantifiable value, which makes all the difference when evaluating opportunities.
I like to say that I probably worked harder than many of the best soccer players in the world today when I was young, but I'm nowhere near their level. However, perhaps if I had talked to the right person, if I had made the right choice when choosing one team over another, I would have had a decent professional career instead of the mediocre one I had.
Maybe I should have worked 10% less and spent 70% more on “networking,” and my chances of making it would have increased by 30% or 20%. But no one knows. And even if you had a way to estimate these probabilities at the population level, the individual realization of random draws from the probability distribution would still be random.
Most of the time, it doesn't take more than 1 or 2 favorable random draws to get where others would die to be.
According to heritability estimates, I had a 5% chance of becoming much taller than my parents, which, we can all agree, is a pretty low probability, but it happened.
Maybe I should have worked 10% less and spent 70% more on “networking,” and my chances of making it would have increased by 30% or 20%. But no one knows. And even if you had a way to estimate these probabilities at the population level, the individual realization of random draws from the probability distribution would still be random. Most of the time, it doesn't take more than 1 or 2 favorable random draws to get where others would die to be.
According to heritability estimates, I had a 5% chance of becoming much taller than my parents, which, we can all agree, is a pretty low probability, but it happened.