Life is so much more complicated. One could be born into success. Luck is a factor. Understanding and exploiting risk is a factor. Persistence is a factor - you could continue to fail until succeed, or you could continue to fail until you teach yourself what is needed to succeed. You could have brilliant ideas but no capital and still fail even though you work hard and are talented. Reducing to success to two or three factors may be true in some cases but those two or three factors may be different in the larger set of successful cases.