Try thinking of it as a case study, not a comprehensive literature review. I didn't really take anything in there as claiming that if I install Musk's mental software then I will succeed at anything I try. The author explicitly mentions several times that Musk thought SpaceX was more likely to fail than succeed. Similarly, there's bits like this: [...] It makes a lot more sense if you read it as a case study. He's positing a bunch of hypotheses, some of which are better worded than others. If you steel-man the ones with obvious holes, most seem plausible. (For example, one of the ones that really annoyed me was the way he worded a claim that older children are less creative, which he blamed on schooling but made no mention of a control group.) But the thing was already pretty long, so I can excuse some of that. He's just hypothesizing a bunch of qualities that are necessary but not sufficient.

I don't think it's as simple as "Successful or outcast" dichotomy. In general, I'd see it as a tradeoff between the cook as "low risk/low reward" and the chef as "high risk/high reward." The chef has higher expected value, but the cook has less failure. I think if you keep doing the chef thing, even in the face of failure, you'll probably eventually hit upon a success (provided you have the other ingredients he has, like talent and drive) - but you probably won't be like Musk, who won the lottery by having success after success.