zlacker

One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias. [1]

No he didn't immediately received the same level of reception and success as Stephen King does, but neither did Stephen King at first! That's why it's skill + dedication. If you look at some of the old videos of people who have succeeded in e.g. social media, they tend to have terrible production quality yet still significantly stand out from the crowd, even their early days. For instance this [2] is one of the first videos Vertasium ever uploaded, 13 years old now! That video, even now still 'only' has 230k views, and certainly had a tiny fraction of that when it was initially released - but he kept at it, clearly putting way more into his videos than he was getting out of them - until that trend reversed.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBjZz0iQrzI

>>somena+(OP)
> One of the few domains where this is testable has also demonstrated this. Writing is about as hard to break into as anything, yet Stephen King demonstrated success writing under a completely unknown alias.

I don't think it actually demonstrates this. As your wording hints, the hard part of writing is getting yourself out of the slush pile and into an editor and publisher's hands, and Stephen King's actions relied on his existing relationship with said editor and publisher to publish under a different name. He never demonstrated pulling the feat of escaping the slush pile again.

In modern content creation, the similar metric is getting to, say, 1k views, or even as prosaically simple as being part of the 50% of streamers to get 1 view. It's not sufficient to have talent to get to even that level of success; there is a lot of luck necessary to get you there.

>>somena+(OP)
The mistake you (and a lot of others are making) is that the people who didn’t make it just weren’t skilled enough.

That isn’t true - I think the people who don’t make it are massively skilled. It’s not random in the sense it’s just selecting randomly from the population. It’s random in the sense that there are 100 elite content producers but at any given moment there is only space for 10 of them.

Stephen King has a massive leg up for already having built the inroads for having a successful book. I think if you give any elite, yet unknown writer, the same tools, editor, and publisher they would succeed. But to truly succeed from nothing may just depend on going to school with someone who became an editor, or the editor’s daughter showing them a TikTok. That’s what is meant by it’s largely random.