I get your point and I get the reason people like to find correlations. I just think reducing dimensionality of really complex stuff is a waste of our time unless your purely talking about investing/gambling and increasing your odds on many bets. It just doesn’t help the “single path” people out there (maybe it wasn’t intended to). We aren’t an average of a simulation, we are just one scenario.
Analogy (because I love analogies): “Seems like people over 7 feet tall make great basketball players.” This is great but it’s much more interesting that a guy named Muggsy Bogues made it to the NBA at 5 foot 3 inches.
I think that's why PG's discussion of whether and how a motivated individual can change or enhance these attributes is interesting, along with the observation that strength in one can make up for relative weakness in another.
I think your analogy fails in that hanging out with tall people can't make you taller. Exceptions to general rules are interesting, but don't have much predictive or explanatory power.
PG isn't claiming to know "the" formula for success, or that anyone else knows it (I doubt there could be such a thing). He's identifying and exploring traits that, from his considerable experience, seem to correlate with business success in a very narrow field, startup companies.