When Talent Isn’t Enough for Success

In a normal distribution, most things are average. In a power-law distribution, a few things are huge, and most are tiny.

M ost people assume success comes from a mix of hard work, talent, and time. And in many careers, that's more or less true. Put in the hours, do good work, improve over time, and you’ll move up. Maybe not to the very top, but certainly toward a stable, respectable middle.

But not every field works that way.

Some careers play by different rules. You can be smart, driven, and genuinely talented—and still struggle for years. Not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because the game itself is different.

Consider law, medicine, consulting, software engineering or most regular jobs. These are bell curve professions. Most people cluster around the middle. A good doctor and a great doctor might earn different salaries, but the gap won’t be astronomical. There’s a ceiling, but there’s also a floor. The system is stable and fairly distributed. Your success doesn’t limit mine as much. There’s room for many winners.

Now compare that to acting, music, sports, writing, or startups. These are power law professions. Here, a small number of people earn almost all the rewards. The top tiny percent make fortunes. The next few percent do okay. The rest—some of them just as skilled—barely survive.

Bell vs. Power Law Distribution

This isn’t about fairness. It’s just how the system works.

In bell curve careers, success is constrained by time. A lawyer can only meet so many clients. A surgeon can only perform so many operations. An engineer can only do one job full-time. Their work doesn’t scale easily. But in power law fields, the work does scale. One song can be streamed a billion times. One app can reach millions overnight. One book can outsell a thousand others. In these worlds, replication is free and reach is unlimited.

And when you combine scale with scarcity of attention, you get a winner-take-most outcome. People don’t listen to a hundred good songs—they listen to a few great ones. They don’t go through all the products on Amazon—they just buy the most visible stuff. Investors don’t back all startups—they bet on a few notable ones.

In power law careers, talent is just the starting line. What matters more is distribution, timing, network, visibility, and often, luck. It’s not just about being good.

The problem is, we often confuse the two worlds. We apply bell curve thinking to power law environments. We assume that being “pretty good” will lead somewhere. We meet a successful actor or founder and think we just need to follow their steps and we will be like them.

But in power law markets, timing and luck are just as or even more important than ability. These systems are not absolute meritocracies.

And misunderstanding that leads to real pain. People enter these fields without realizing how skewed the distribution really is. They compare themselves against the top, without realizing how rare those outcomes are. It’s easy to end up burned out, bitter, or stuck chasing a version of success that was never realistically designed to include most people.

None of this means you shouldn’t go for it. Some of the most impactful work happens in power law fields. But you need to understand the terrain. You need to know the risks, and what it really takes to succeed.

In bell curve careers, progress is linear. In power law careers, it’s spiky, delayed, and invisible—until suddenly, it isn’t.

The key is knowing what kind of game you’re playing and to play accordingly.