TMZ reports that Kobe Bryant passed away.

[JimLes]

Hard work can’t turn you into a LeBron. My internal debate is if it can turn you into a Messi. I still say no, but I’m less confident in my answer. Messi is so skilled, and talented. Can it be learned? 85% no

Messi is five-foot-seven with a low centre of gravity. His dribbling wizardry is almost exclusively restricted to people under 6 feet. You're unlikely to be Messi at 6 foot 3. He is also naturally left footed in a right footed world.

 

[Jazz Spazz]

Competitive soccer in Utah is the same world, but you reeled off a list of things that aren’t chance. Schmoozing and working the system are things you proactively do. The timing in talking to the right people usually comes down to identifying the right people and putting yourself into a position to talk to them. Getting in with a good group is also something you proactively work towards.

JimLes is making excuses. He attributes not being Jimmy Page due to not being lucky with genetics. Unlucky JimLes attended a European music academy for 3-4 years, had a father live through three years of being a soldier in war and moved their family from a poor Balkan town to wealthy Canada when he was in Middle School. From there, JimLes put in his usual 14% effort, noodled on the guitar, and blamed it on luck that no one showed up to his house to award him with fame and fortune.

Meanwhile in England young Jimmy Page was pestering everyone he could pester to play on records as a session musician. Page’s parents weren’t rich or connected. It was Jimmy’s dogged persistence that resulted in his playing with dozens of bands until he finally fell in with the Yard Birds. When that band broke up, Jimmy Page worked hard to find the closest thing he could to a clone of Roger Daltrey and he proactively built Led Zeppelin. It wasn’t only playing the guitar Jimmy Page worked hard at. It was working the system, schmoozing, positioning himself to talk to the right people, getting in a good group, etc. No one went to unknown Jimmy Page’s house to award him fame and fortune.

Show me someone who says success is nothing but luck and I’ll show you someone who puts in 14% effort.

ps JimLes = Jimmy Page + Les Paul?

You read him wrong. Did he ever say “just” luck.

Also schmoozing, working the system, and all that aren’t all work and workable too. Plenty of people try it but get in the wrong group that doesn’t work out. Bad luck, hard work. Some people schmooze people but those people fall out of power. Bad luck, time to schmooze someone else? Sure you have to identify the right people, but you also have to have the opportunity. Not everyone gets the opportunity and hard/smart work doesn’t get it for you all the time. It can help you capitalize, but plenty of people work hard and smart and fail at their dream, and that’s fine. I hope they learned a ton about themselves in the journey and see it as a success in another way.

It’s not just work.

You are working hard to paint JimLes as lazy. I don’t know him but I’ll say I don’t agree with that take and say you misunderstand the essence of what he’s saying.

You don’t know JimLes. You don’t know Jimmy Page. Maybe someone did go to his house to award him fame and he said no, I want no luck… I want to work hard for this. Please don’t introduce me to people. Next time, tell it that way.

 

[JimLes]

From there, JimLes put in his usual 14% effort, noodled on the guitar, and blamed it on luck that no one showed up to his house to award him with fame and fortune.

Hey, that's unfair. I also troweled through boxes of old blues records like Jimmy Page, looking for riffs to steal and dead black men to rob of their intellectual rights. You know how much time, money and effort that took?

P.S. The secret is to take the riffs and licks and play them backwards. That way no one can tell.

 

[Jazz Spazz]

Messi is five-foot-seven with a low centre of gravity. His dribbling wizardry is almost exclusively restricted to people under 6 feet. You're unlikely to be Messi at 6 foot 3. He is also naturally left footed in a right footed world.

There are so many more Messi wannabe’s than LeBron wannabe’s but none can replicate it. The height, yea. The skill, no. The guy is a wizard. Even at 5’7, try to be Messi. Impossible.

 

[JimLes]

There are so many more Messi wannabe’s than LeBron wannabe’s but none can replicate it. The height, yea. The skill, no. The guy is a wizard. Even at 5’7, try to be Messi. Impossible.

Right, but it's all related. Height is just one of the many prerequisites. I would argue that in the case of Messi, or since we're on a basketball forum, someone like Larry Bird, LeBron, or more contemporarily, Jokić, the biggest thing is what you'd call reading the game.

Just like any tool, you can hone it, but you gotta have the tool to begin with. You can't learn court vision any more than you can learn lateral quickness.

 

[Al-O-Meter]

You read him wrong. Did he ever say “just” luck.

Here is what he said:

Everything, everything about life is about luck.

 

[JimLes]

And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that hard work plays no part. I'm suggesting that it plays a much smaller part. In the case of becoming an NBA player, hard work is like actually going down to the gas station to buy the lottery ticket. Most of it is luck, but yeah, you do have to actually buy the ticket as well. It's the much easier part than your numbers being drawn, though.

My little nephew is 4. He is starting to get into sort-of-video games on his phone(don't ask), so I thought I'd get him to play some real video games. So I set up some retro stuff for us. You know, some SNES and Genesis emulators. I have two controllers, and one is mapped like your regular controller. Direction pad, the 4 buttons. Just like a Super Nintendo controller would be. It even looks identical to it, as my little sister got me some PC replica controllers. The other controller has no directional pad mapping and all keys are bound to the jump button. So, I move around and my nephew just presses jump. Or more precisely, presses anything on his controller and it makes the character jump. And when he forgets to, I just press jump on mine. He loves it. He thinks he's amazing at old video games and who am I to ruin this for him?

That's pretty much what life is. If you're lucky enough to have someone else doing most of the controls, all you have to do is press jump. It does take some skill and timing, but it's wholly unlike having to play by yourself and control everything.

 

[Jazz Spazz]

Here is what he said:

Maybe, maybe I read the situation wrong. I’m not Mr literal like you seem to be. People tend to speak in absolutes to get a point across, even when they don’t mean the absolute fully.

I stick to my meaning while admitting I see your point.

 

[JimLes]

I mean, not to throw around the fact that I'm an English teacher, but "Luck is the only thing" and "Everything is about luck" are obviously not the same thing. You'd think a monolingual, native English speaker would be better at understanding nuances of the language than an ESL immigrant, but hey. Here we are.

I used to work in insurance as well, so forgive me for conflating incredibly improbable and absolutely, categorically impossible. It's an industry thing, but it's also just a real life thing. It's not physically impossible(such as running on the surface of the Sun would be) for a 5-foot-5 kid born in 2000 and still living in Afghanistan to make the Jazz roster this October, but it's incredibly improbable. To a point where we probably need not worry about the difference between the two.

Luck is everything. You're never going to be in a position to push that jump button without it.

 

[LogGrad98]

Mark Cuban attributed the vast majority of his success to luck. Luck is decidedly a huge factor in success anywhere in the human world. It cannot be denied. I have a cousin who bet big on a now more or less defunct brand and collected a multi-million dollar payday. Set him up for life. But it was really, at the time even, a stupid bet that just happened to pay off. I have a good friend who has built a roughly $2 million portfolio of investments by age 55. He did it through careful analysis and a ton of work in the markets, diversification, all that...oh and he got into and out of a few stocks at exactly the right time to see huge gains. You could argue all his hard work made him good at analyzing so he knew which stocks to bet on, but he'll tell you he fell into it, knew nothing about the industries, and got extremely lucky on a few moderate bets that paid off big.

The influence of luck cannot be overestimated.

 

[Jazz Spazz]

I’ve always wanted my kids to feel lucky and confident, so when they get a question right I tell them it was a lucky guess. When they succeed at something, it was a lucky chance.

Nothin like the feeling of helping your kids feel lucky at the end of the day.

Me and Tiger Woods dad are complete opposites, but both super successful.