Because if Ambani got lucky, you don’t have to examine why you didn’t build what he built. If Elon got lucky, you don’t have to confront the fact that he slept on a factory floor while you were optimising your work-life balance. If every billionaire on earth is simply the beneficiary of circumstance, timing, and privilege — then the gap between them and you is not your responsibility.
And that is exactly why the narrative survives. Not because it’s true. Because it’s comfortable.
Here is what actually happened.
The people who built billion-dollar enterprises were not smarter than you. They were not born with a special capacity that you lack. What they had — and what almost nobody is willing to talk about honestly — was an appetite for discomfort that was genuinely pathological. They stayed in rooms where the pressure would have broken most people. They made decisions with incomplete information and lived with the consequences. They were wrong constantly and kept going anyway. They gave up things that you would not give up — sleep, relationships, certainty, the approval of people they respected — because the thing they were building mattered more than any of it.
That is not luck. That is a specific, repeatable pattern of choices made over a very long time.
The Tata family didn’t inherit a brand. They built one across generations through a consistent standard of ethics and quality that was maintained even when it cost them. Narayan Murthy didn’t discover Infosys. He built it from a $250 loan and the kind of clarity about what he was trying to create that most people never achieve about anything in their lives.
The world loves the lottery winner story. It hates the 20-year overnight success story. Because the second one requires a conclusion it doesn’t want to draw.
There is no shortcut. There is no luck that substitutes for the work. There is no timing that saves you from the requirement to be genuinely, completely, uncomfortably better than everyone around you for long enough that the market has no choice but to acknowledge it.
The billionaire worked when you weren’t watching. That’s not inspiring content. That’s the actual answer.
Stop looking for the luck. Start looking for what you’re not willing to do yet.
That gap is the only gap that matters.
