Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy.
Also the most sure path to finish in the 1% wealthiest is to start in its network.
When the game is set to make 99% of players considered as losers in its own terms, the best strategy to have fun at scale is to not care about the highlighted goal. Keep awareness of how rules actually apply, take shortcuts if it feels safe and preferable, always respect human dignity even when nasty players try to make a dirty move agaisnt you, don't let the lowering bare of hate infect one more player.
I am having trouble thinking of situations where the only good outcome is being the top 1%. There are, to be sure, often power-law benefits to being exceptionally good, but to use your own example, being in the top 5% or 10% of wealth is nothing to sneeze at. It's all a spectrum.
With that said, I think you make some good points about the perspective people should have about competitive goals. Most contests are not strict meritocracies, and you are in for a lot of frustration if you assume that only effort matters when other slide by on their structural advantages. I would prefer to reframe the goal as 'work hard on what you have control over, as long as it provides some amount of benefit, and as long as you still care about the outcome.'
This wasn't to mean that ending up in the top percentile of whatever metric is a good outcome, simply that those who advocate the game and its rules will generally tell what is supposed to be valuable and praised as part of the game framing. My point wasn't to tell that taking blindly this or that outcome as a desirable one is advisable.
For the second paragraph, we seem really aligned on the developed points.
Yes. An interesting corollary is that we should pay close attention to what games we have an inherent advantage in, and double down. Much higher chances of reaping those power-law benefits. I speak, frankly, mostly to myself here: I am naturally pretty bad at almost all human skills (although I’ve of course worked hard to build up at the competencies required to be a functioning adult and partner.) But for the one or two things I am naturally good at, it all comes so very easily, it’s effortless and free and I have built my life around them.
>Success is relative. If the goal is to never fail, never try is the best strategy.
This is dangerously not true, if you never try, then you are guaranteed to fail to live up to your potential, which is one of the greatest failures of all.
Sorry if it wasn't clear and explicit enough, but this wasn't meant to be an advise to not try anything. Just an extrem example of what it might be logically concluded when starting from unsound grounds. Never fail is not a sound goal.
That said living up to our potential is not very much better per se. Or at least it seems far too vague to be aptly considered. What forces are going to define what it is to tap relevantly in our potential?
Yes. I like to think that all of the people above could have solved most of the same problems, albeit in wonderfully different styles, but what really guaranteed success was a commitment to just keep at it.
Edit to add: Still, the styles matter a lot! For one thing, they greatly influence which problems each person is interested in. Also, the style you solve problems with colors what your final output looks like, which is perhaps more obvious in engineering than in mathematics.
