My favorite Derek Sivers quote: "If information was all it took, we'd all be billionaires with six-pack abs!"
I find there is a great logical fallacy with many people. They assume that someone who is successful knew what they were doing and following that recipe will produce similar results.
Problem is that those successful people themselves probably won't even be able to obtain the same results with the same formula...
Bill Gates? Very intelligent, very business aggressive, would have done well in any field, but the reason he became so monumentally rich was an equally monumental mistake by IBM...
A lot of success is due to right place right time effects. Of course there is plenty of competence, work and sacrifice involved but many people who worked just as hard, were just as competent and intelligent got nowhere with exactly the same formula.
I think Scott Adams point of view makes more sense when it comes to success:
exactly
many people overlook this