Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Luck and randomness dictate our lives and successes far more than we are willing to admit, and we constantly fool ourselves by mistaking pure chance for measurable skill.
Survivorship bias skews our perception of reality because the losers are permanently hidden from view.
Mild success can often be explained by hard work, but wild success is largely a product of variance and luck.
You cannot evaluate the quality of a decision based solely on its outcome because alternative histories could have yielded completely different results.