That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
> That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?
Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.
Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.
Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.
I mostly agree with you but "work ethics" is also partially genetic. It's defined partly by a big five trait called conscientiousness which has a fair percentage of its effects not explainable by the environment or random chance.
Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.
The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
Success (by which most people mean financial success, fame, or winning in some competition) is certainly worshipped.
However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.
I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).
Being better than other hard working people can also involve simply kicking the ladder from underneath you, playing the social status game or making bets at the edge of the law and shoving that risk onto other people.
And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.
Most top athletes have excellent work ethic but they also have natural ability. No amount of work ethic can compensate for lack of natural ability. You absolutely need that to get to the top.
I think pg is trying to argue that passionate disinterest is different from work ethic. For a person like Ronaldo, all of the off-field training might be enjoyable. If it is, then is it really work ethic? Or is it just Ronaldo doing what he wants to do and would be doing anyway, if there were no such thing as money?
I'm not the parent, but from my pov FB is a net negative for society, so if they are unwilling to play by our laws, then I'd rather see them get the fuck out.
They won't of course, because it leaves the market open for grabs.
If they leave the EU though they don't need to follow European laws or pay European taxes, but that doesn't prevent European users from continuing to use the actual website.
There was a study recently showing that people that do not have Facebook account are happier :) Not to mention their personal data are not being abused.
i don't use facebook and i do agree its bad for egopaths. But i have some friends who use it to communicate with their family back in their countries and it's a valuable service for that reason.
On the other hand, having learned PHP inside-out as my first language, this is perfectly natural to me, and I miss the flexibility of PHP arrays in other languages :)
Before the usual avalanche of posts criticising some PHP 4 features, the union types look like a nice way to formalise something that is commonly used and very useful.
I went to a school in south-west Poland. My experiences were not too dissimilar to those described here, so I think this account is entirely plausible.
