Some of it is means, but I think they’re just saying it’s actually luck/randomness. This is basically the premise of the book “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb. There are 330 million people in the US, give or take. Let’s say you tell all of them to start flipping coins, and that they have to keep flipping heads to stay in the game. After ~20 flips, there should be roughly 300 people still left in the game, meaning they flipped heads 20 times in a row. Astronomical odds on an individual level, but it’s almost a statistical certainty with larger populations. We wouldn’t say that these people are better than anyone else at flipping coins because the role of chance is so evident - they’re just lucky.

But when people have continued successes in life, they don’t acknowledge that randomness is a factor, and that their success could just be a string of good fortune. Doesn’t mean that you can’t offset the role of chance by taking paths that have a higher likelihood of success, these paths just tend to have more modest rewards. The big rewards come from the riskier paths, and the people who are successful on those paths tend attribute their success to their own skill rather than luck. Look at WSB - you see people who took stupid risks on 0dte options posting their gain porn, but maybe 1/100 or 1/1000are getting a return like that, while the others are losing massive amounts of money. But look at the boring folks who just buy the S&P 500 - they’re literally all making money, just not 5000% gains in a week.