> The better team is the team that finds a way to win - even if it is weird and flukey and doesn't fit a nice narrative.
Except all of sports data science disagrees with you. Long term trends say that a team who keeps possession of the ball the majority of the time is the team that is more likely to win. An individual game might suggest otherwise - a team that has the ball 90% of the time can lose to a goal in other 10%. But over 100 games, the trend becomes pretty clear.
> The better team is the team that finds a way to win - even if it is weird and flukey and doesn't fit a nice narrative.
No, that is the narrative. The better team doesn't always win, that's life, but people who want it to be true will say things like "the Cavaliers just wanted it more and found a way to win". Sometimes shit happens and the better team loses, and you need to recognize it as an outlier.
Successful people definitely "find a way" more than average, but if you're unable to recognize that sometimes there really is nothing to be done, that's an issue. Your attitude kind of reminds me of the Ron Swanson quote "everything I do is the attitude of an award winner, for I have won an award." The fact that you lost doesn't mean that everything you did was the behavior of a loser. Chance exists, there are no guarantees in life.
> The better job candidate finds a way to get to the interview on time - regardless of unexpected difficulties.
I know someone who was late to an interview because a terrorist attack led to a city-wide transit shutdown. They could have made it, but they would have had to leave ~24 hours early based on zero information. Is it really useful to equate that with someone who was late because they forgot to get gas the day before?
More broadly, this entire list comes down to throwing out useful data and calling it a better prediction. The entire concept of a "good excuse" is to recognize "wow, that's way outside normal parameters, not planning for that is reasonable". I agree that people often appeal to flukes and bad luck when it's unreasonable, but this list just reinforces the face that chance really is a part of life.
"I know someone who was late to an interview because a terrorist attack led to a city-wide transit shutdown."
On the one hand, I must object to the obvious reductio ad absurdum. Even I would be interested in, and sympathetic to, that narrative.
On the other hand, imagine the information contained in the event of the prospective employee that actually made it into the interview that day. There's a lot of information there that should not be ignored.
If football team A wins a because an act of god wiped out team B, I don't believe A were the better team even for that game. You've got a chip on your shoulder about people making excuses, when obviously excuses can be valid.
The better team is the team that finds a way to win - even if it is weird and flukey and doesn't fit a nice narrative.
The better job candidate finds a way to get to the interview on time - regardless of unexpected difficulties.
The strong ACL doesn't tear just doing normal activities. You step strangely every single day and don't notice it.
(also, the word you are looking for is refuted, not rebuked)