There’s a curious pattern you’ll notice if you spend time around highly successful people across different fields. Whether they’re entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, or athletes, they tend to converge on surprisingly similar views about how the world works. This isn’t coincidence, groupthink, or some kind of elite conspiracy. It’s something much simpler: reality has an objective structure, and people who succeed have learned to see it clearly.
Consider what happens when someone builds a successful business. They can’t afford to operate on pleasant fictions or comforting myths. The market doesn’t care about their theories or ideology. It responds to value, timing, execution, and countless other concrete factors. A founder who insists that customers should want their product, despite all evidence to the contrary, will fail. The one who accurately reads market signals and adapts accordingly will thrive. Over time, this creates a selection effect. Successful people are those who have aligned their mental models with reality closely enough to navigate it effectively.
This same dynamic plays out in every domain where results matter. Scientists must submit their theories to experimental testing. Athletes receive immediate, undeniable feedback from their performance. Engineers learn quickly when their designs don’t account for the actual properties of materials and forces. In each case, reality acts as an unforgiving teacher, and those who learn its lessons most accurately are the ones who advance.
What’s particularly interesting is how this convergence happens across fields. A successful tech entrepreneur and a successful military strategist might seem to inhabit completely different worlds, yet they often share remarkably similar intuitions about human nature, decision-making under uncertainty, risk management, and the importance of execution over theory. This isn’t because they’ve read the same books or attended the same seminars. It’s because they’ve both spent years getting real-time feedback from reality in their respective domains, and reality tends to teach consistent lessons.
The objectivity of reality doesn’t mean that everything is simple or that there’s only one right answer to every question. Reality is enormously complex, and different situations call for different approaches. But within that complexity, there are patterns, principles, and regularities that hold true regardless of what we’d prefer to believe. Gravity works the same way whether you’re a billionaire or a philosopher. Human psychology follows certain patterns whether you acknowledge them or not. Compound interest has the same mathematical properties no matter your political persuasion.
Successful people also tend to share a certain epistemological humility, which might seem paradoxical. They’re confident in their ability to navigate reality, but they’re also acutely aware of how much they don’t know and how easily they can be wrong. This isn’t a contradiction. It’s precisely because they take reality seriously that they’re cautious about their own limitations. Someone operating on pure ideology or wishful thinking can afford to be certain about everything because they’re not really constraining their beliefs with external reality. Someone trying to build something real has to constantly test their assumptions and update their beliefs based on results.This is why debates between highly successful people in different fields are often surprisingly productive. They might start with different frameworks or vocabularies, but they share a fundamental commitment to getting things right rather than being right. When an experienced founder talks with an experienced scientist about risk or uncertainty, they find common ground quickly because both have been humbled by reality enough times to recognize truth when they see it.Of course, successful people can still disagree, sometimes vehemently. But look closely at what they disagree about. It’s rarely about basic facts or well-established principles. Instead, disagreements tend to cluster around genuinely uncertain questions, different values and priorities, or different predictions about complex systems. A venture capitalist and a climate scientist might disagree about the optimal policy response to climate change, but they’re unlikely to disagree about whether climate change is happening or whether incentives shape human behavior.
The alternative view, that reality is purely subjective or that success is just about confidence and narrative-building, runs into some serious problems. If there were no objective reality constraining outcomes, we’d expect to see successful people with wildly divergent worldviews. We’d expect that any belief system should work equally well. We’d expect that people could succeed by ignoring feedback and doubling down on failed strategies. But that’s not what we observe. What we see instead is that reality exerts consistent pressure, selecting for those who perceive it accurately and punishing those who don’t.
This has implications for how we should think about disagreement more broadly. When you encounter a view that virtually all successful people in a domain reject, it’s worth taking seriously that there might be something wrong with that view. Not because successful people are infallible or because we should defer to authority, but because these are people who have been subjected to intense reality-testing in their field. Their convergence on certain beliefs isn’t arbitrary. It reflects the structure of reality pushing back on their ideas over many years.
None of this means that success is the only path to truth or that unsuccessful people can’t have accurate views. Reality is complicated, success requires many factors beyond just accurate perception, and sometimes people fail despite seeing things clearly. But it does suggest that when we see patterns of agreement among people who have succeeded in navigating reality in different domains, we should pay attention. They might be seeing something real.
The takeaway isn’t that we should simply believe whatever successful people say. It’s that we should recognize why their views tend to converge. Reality has a structure. That structure can be perceived and understood. And people who stake their outcomes on accurate perception tend to develop similar understandings over time because they’re all learning from the same teacher: the world as it actually is.