I think people generally think luck is more of a factor in success than it is, rather than it being under-appreciated as you claimed.
You might think there's some luck in joining Google in 2001, but that ignores a prior decade spent on information retrieval, which was VERY MUCH NOT a hot CS field -- it was arguably the opposite. It's not luck when you spent huge amounts of time on something you care about, but other people don't care about. And when you happen to join some like-minded people well before they were successful.
There are also plenty of brilliant people who also joined Google in 2001 who never became VP of search. Based on that, I'm saying there is NO possibility that he doesn't have extreme talent. You don't get to the top at Google accidentally.
Extreme success obviously involves both luck and talent, but luck isn't that much of it. Bill Gates got lucky in many ways, but he would have been tremendously successful no matter what. To a lesser degree, I'm sure the same is true of Amit.
If he wasn't viewed as a top student, well that means diddly squat and isn't surprising at all. Contrary to the grandparent, I would NOT expect the top students in the class to become the most successful. People who overoptimize for academic success are generally somewhat obedient... Early engineers who become VPs, founders, and other successful people are not obedient (whatever their other flaws).
This is a really old argument too, which your comment isn't really doing justice.
That's the part that most people call lucky. When the thing you spent a decade working on because you found it personally interesting suddenly becomes the thing everybody else wants.
So I would call that closer to being "visionary" rather than being lucky. In other words, it's seeing something before other people see it. Seeing unrecognized potential is a skill that I believe requires a certain form of intelligence.
You could imagine someone choosing information retrieval without any special insight... but those kinds of people usually don't have enough curiosity or motivation to get to the frontier of the field and push the boundary.
When you say "someone got lucky", you are usually undermining their success, by implying that their personal talents and hard work didn't have much to do with it.
He did not say that. If 100 people work on diverse subjects for 10 years because they have a personal interest in them and one of the subjects suddenly becomes a hot topic, then one of the persons is a winner.
It is possible to reverse your argument and say that you are undermining the success of the remaining 99.
You might think there's some luck in joining Google in 2001, but that ignores a prior decade spent on information retrieval, which was VERY MUCH NOT a hot CS field -- it was arguably the opposite. It's not luck when you spent huge amounts of time on something you care about, but other people don't care about. And when you happen to join some like-minded people well before they were successful.
There are also plenty of brilliant people who also joined Google in 2001 who never became VP of search. Based on that, I'm saying there is NO possibility that he doesn't have extreme talent. You don't get to the top at Google accidentally.
Extreme success obviously involves both luck and talent, but luck isn't that much of it. Bill Gates got lucky in many ways, but he would have been tremendously successful no matter what. To a lesser degree, I'm sure the same is true of Amit.
If he wasn't viewed as a top student, well that means diddly squat and isn't surprising at all. Contrary to the grandparent, I would NOT expect the top students in the class to become the most successful. People who overoptimize for academic success are generally somewhat obedient... Early engineers who become VPs, founders, and other successful people are not obedient (whatever their other flaws).
This is a really old argument too, which your comment isn't really doing justice.