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This is because success has a "flattening" effect in the immediate neighborhood. The world around you adapts to you through the progressive effect of a strengthening reality-distortion field. It grows to include a core group, a larger group, a company, a market...
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This is, in my experience... basically true. Good leaders are weirdly, presciently, right. In a series of uncertain, ambiguous decisions, where rational analysis might expect say a 30% hit rate, they're hitting 80-90, even 100% for brief periods.
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This is more than Taleb's "fooled by randomness" effect because it's not like betting on the market. This is "being right a lot" due to the world having arranged itself in your local neighborhood to consistently prove your theory right.
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Second piece of... not evidence, but... illuminating narrative false-color from a perceptive observer, Douglas Adams In Hitchhiker's Guide.
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Zaphod Beeblebrox goes into the Total Perspective Vortex and, much to the amazement of the others, does NOT come out stark raving mad from having gazed into the void and realized his own utter insignificance (which is what the machine is supposed to do)
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Instead he comes out feeling validated: the TPV validates what he already believes: he is the most important guy in the universe. The reason, in the book, is simple: they are in a universe that was created for Zaphod so he's obviously the most important person in it.
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So successful people develop a genuine local Midas touch that makes them BOTH winners and "right a lot" ... in their sphere of influence/within their reality distortion field. Which can be as big as a large corporation or a third of a nation, and last as long as 10-15 years.
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These are crazy conditions, right? No normal human mind could get through the stress of being so much rightness, so much winning, without developing an epistemology based on the locally simplest Occam's Razor: your theory of your own success is right, as far as your eye can see.
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