Somehow conversation turns to the great generals -- the 4 and 5 star generals.
"How many great generals are there?" asks the physicist.
"No more than about 1 in 20 is a truly great general", they answer.
"How do you decide who is a 4- or 5- star general?" the physicist asks.
The army men decide that you need to have won 5 battles to be a great general.
The physicist then explains how it can easily be luck. Suppose that battle success is randomly determined. A general has a 0.5^5 chance of winning 5/5 battles out of sheer luck -- 3.125% in fact. Therefore the majority of "Great Generals" are just lucky.
The point of the anecdote is that the null hypothesis -- that 5-star generals are there basically because somebody "wins" each battle and that a fixed percentage of these will win 5 in a row -- is difficult to distinguish from genuine tactical skill.
That's the point of the article too. We too often attribute to skill what can just as reasonably be luck. Partly because of survivor bias: Zuckerberg et al are the one group out of the hundreds of contenders who succeeded in getting runaway network effects. But if contenders had non-zero chances of success, somebody was bound to succeed. The null hypothesis is that Zuckerberg was just lucky and it is basically not easy to disprove, given that as I said above there's nothing particularly unusual about him or Facebook going into the fight.
If you win, it is true that not everyone could do what you did (you were the best runner out of a thousand). It also true that luck played a HUGE role (one in a million odds after putting yourself in the right place based on skill).
The reason I say luck didn't play a big role, is because not anyone could do what he did.
Can anybody from a 5 year old to a grandmother build Facebook? If not, there must be skill required to accomplish the task.
To build the application behind Facebook alone takes skill (taking out a large percentage of the population). To build the company up to what it is (and make the right decisions) takes another set of skills. I think the luck factor is around 10%.
Of course there is a certain amount of luck with anything that we do. I have always felt that there are lucky situations all around us. Without the proper skills to recognize it, most people will just let it pass by.