I’m sympathetic to the model—in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of “toughness” (a few decades ago they called it “grit” or “determination”, now it rhymes with “agentic”). It’s tempting to simplify things to that level.
But I’m also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don’t actually think it’s true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.
There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it’s 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)
I’m sympathetic to the model—in many cases it seems that there is a generalizable trait of “toughness” (a few decades ago they called it “grit” or “determination”, now it rhymes with “agentic”). It’s tempting to simplify things to that level.
But I’m also skeptical of my own desire to believe that, and I don’t actually think it’s true often enough to count on it. When I press myself on edge cases or most specific data->prediction proposals, it loses a lot of appeal.
There are clearly some people who fare better than others across many domains. Exactly which traits cause this, and how ingrained and unchanging those traits are, remains quite difficult to pin down. Personally, I think it’s 50% luck, 50% genes, 50% early environment, and 50% current environment. Yes, success is overdetermined :)