But that is just confirmation bias. You cannot infer valid conclusions by just looking at the success stories. By that same logic you can conclude that eating food leads to becoming one of the greats, because they all ate food.
Fact is that most failures and sacrifices don't lead to great success. But of course most of them don't result in some humble-brag grind-set blog post either.
So those sacrifices and failures are under-represented, and this leads to people who are not well versed in statistics, to conclude that therefore sacrifices and failures are somehow a necessary step in the way to success.
But that's false. There are loads of people with good ideas and talent who have made plenty of sacrifices but still have never seen success, and there are loads of people who gain success without any meaningful sacrifice at all.
Another point is that I don't think those sacrifices were difficult decisions for those 'greats'. Because another overlooked difference between people is an inherent ability to relentlessly pursue a singular goal. So even though they might have felt bad about giving up on something at the time, they did so because it was standing in the way of what they truly wanted.
I this way, could you really say they have sacrificed anything at all? If you really care about productivity and don't care so much about comfort, is it really a sacrifice to spend the night at the office?
It's the people who don't really care about all that who have to make the hardest sacrifices, in which case maybe better advice is to tell them to not make the sacrifice.
Just living your life without wanting to attain status is a perfectly valid go to try to achieve.
I think you have your statistical inference backwards.
> By that same logic you can conclude that eating food leads to becoming one of the greats, because they all ate food.
No your logic is wrong. The data you have is that "All people who are successful eat food." That does not imply that "If you eat food, you will be successful."
But it does imply "If you do not eat food, you will not be successful." And that's certainly a true fact. Starving to death and being dead is not a viable path to success, or at least not any kind of success you will be around to experience.
If you see that all people in category X have a certain property Y, that's good data that you'll need to have Y before you can be an X. But it does not imply that having Y will make you an X. It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
To the original point, it seems that nearly all successful people have to make some difficult sacrifices to get there. So, yes, you probably will also have to make difficult sacrifices to be successful. But even so, that's no guarantee of success. It's just that not making any sacrifices is a guarantee of not being successful.
I'm ignoring, of course, that "success" is highly subjective and individually determined. But certainly when it comes to marathon runners, you won't find any successful ones that didn't have to make real sacrifices to get there. Long distance running is hard.
Well i mean if your natural talents and interest are enough to get you to, say 5th place on some stage how likely are you really to just give up at that and not push to place higher, what if you got second and knew you'd have a chance again next year. I bet sacrifice could describe a lot of the consequences of attempting to place higher.
Also, isn't literally every sacrifice just an opportunity cost? That kinda what makes it a sacrifice. Sacrifice your first born and give up the extra productivity possible. Sacrifice a lucrative but over taxing job and lose out on the money. Sacrifice a meal for someone and you go hungry. Sacrifice is always about the opportunity cost of the thing you're sacrificing. If it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't cost you something, it's not a sacrifice.
e.g. if you overtrain or don’t wait long enough after an injury, you may permanently damage something forever. Speaking from personal experience and knowing a lot of people who have done the same. There’s also some documentaries about athletes doing it and losing it all. Go the extra mile but don’t look back and have regret about that one time.
And since "important" is relative to the person making the sacrifice, it's easy for a person to declare something a sacrifice when what they were giving up was not especially important to them, or on the other hand for someone to dismiss a "real sacrifice" that someone else has made as unimportant.
Not that this matters, really. But I think it's important not to use them synonymously. In the case of an opportunity cost, you are acknowledging that there were things given up. In the case of a sacrifice, you are saying there were things given up _and it hurt_.
denotation and connotation. They have the same literal meaning (denotation) but certainly not the same implication and tone (connotation). Choosing to eat a turkey sandwich vs roast beef is an opportunity cost. I'm forgoing the roast beef. But it isn't really a sacrifice. I could say that it, and it would be true in some sense (denotation) but it would be very hyperbolic of me.
What if top-tier "greats" viewed every 'sacrifice' as superficially as roast beef vs. turkey? Even the ones we decidedly do not, like having a kid, starting a family, etc. vs. what they want to do?
