
The Role of Luck in Life Success - hourislate
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-role-of-luck-in-life-success-is-far-greater-than-we-realized/
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OnlineGladiator
I've had a saying for a long time: it's better to be lucky than good. It
doesn't matter how good you are if you're unlucky, and it doesn't matter how
bad you are if you're lucky.

There are lots of complicated statements around luck and success. For
instance, how lucky was Zuckerberg to have been at Harvard for college when he
was? He obviously saw an opportunity and turned it into Facebook, but do you
think it's even conceivable he could have done that had he not happened to
have been a student at Harvard? What if the Winklevoss twins had never
approached him in the first place? What if he never met Sean Parker? There
were a string of things that had to line up for the story to evolve the way it
did, and none of them were in Zuckerberg's control.

It's very easy to come up with examples of people just being unlucky. You
could be born with a serious illness. Your child could die during birth. It's
easy to think of situations that are just awful and there is nothing you could
have done to prevent those awful things from occurring.

There are lots of simple statements around luck and happiness. Nobody argues
whether or not you're lucky to be born rich, healthy, tall, attractive,
etcetera. But people argue over whether or not intelligence is driven largely
by nature or by nurture. Experts even argue over whether or not happiness
itself is largely determined by genetics.

The general takeaway is luck is by definition what you cannot control so it's
a fool's errand to try to do so. But success is what happens when luck
stumbles across someone who was prepared to take advantage of it. Zuckerberg
may have been lucky to have been at Harvard when he was, but he immediately
saw the opportunity and turned it into Facebook - and (love him or hate him)
he deserves credit for that.

~~~
walkingolof
Most of the time you have to work hard to be lucky...

~~~
chx
Or if you are lucky you need to work hard to do something with it.

Quite a few years ago I lived a few bus stops from the venue of the yearly PHP
conference in Hungary but somehow I never went. Just didn't seem worthwhile or
something. In 2004 May, a friend of mine called on a Sunday he is going to
attend the roadshow of said conference in a shitty rural city in Hungary with
his brother driving and whether I wanted to tag along. I shrugged and went.
Still have no idea why. That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible
at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. Being
present at that roadshow was luck. My meteoric rise from financially
struggling Hungarian web developer to internationally acclaimed Drupal
developer and architect of a Top 100 web property only five years later was,
however, the result of me pouring practically every awake moment into Drupal
(I believe it was a Google Summer Of Code mentor questionarie which asked how
much extra time are we spending with our project and I still remember when I
was like, I am not spending any extra time because that'd be impossible). The
finances aligned. When I attended my first Drupal developer come together in
2005 February in Antwerp I needed to borrow money from my parents for the
plane ticket and couch surf for I had no money. I bought a apartment right
down on the beach in Vancouver in 2009... And yes, this seemed unreal and it
still does, walking home every time fills me with a sense of "this is too good
to be true".

~~~
nemo44x
> That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then
> despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then.

As the old saying goes, "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness".

You were prepared for this by evidence of you research into CMS's at the time.
This enabled you to see the opportunity Drupal created. You clearly ran with
this and your success followed.

How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you did?
They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you. If
anything, you were lucky to have had the insight to see the potential an
investment in Drupal could make and clearly it went beyond your wildest dreams
in terms of financial and professional success. But even then I'd hesitate to
call it all luck since you clearly saw that CMS's were becoming an important
technology and Drupal in particular must have fused what you knew about CMS's
and what could be possible.

~~~
chx
> How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you
> did? They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you.

Ha that's right.

What I must have seen but failed to put into words is [https://dri.es/drupal-
sucks-less](https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less):

> All content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less. —
> Boris Mann at DrupalCON Amsterdam, August 2005.

Typo3, Tikiwiki, Phpnuke (heaven forbid), XOOPS, even Mambo/Joomla, these were
the systems of the day. Drupal ... sucked less and gained a lot more
marketshare.

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carrozo
I’ve had this old post from Marc Andreessen pinned in my mental browser for a
long time now. There are four types of luck and you can influence three of
them:

 _Chance I is completely impersonal; you can 't influence it._

 _Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things
coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore._

 _Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge
plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly
forming significant new associations._

 _Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal
lifestyles, and motor behaviors._

[https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html](https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html)

~~~
vntx
Boy, how lucky I am.

The probability of me stumbling upon this informative gem would have been
pretty low if I hadn’t been lurking around HN.

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friedman23
As an avid poker player I think that the game reasonably approximates luck's
role in life. There will be many situations where you will lose despite having
done everything right and you will see other people win despite having done
everything wrong. Both of these situations generally cause people to complain
about injustice in the world, make illogical damaging decisions in desperation
(go on tilt), or give up. Which of course causes them to lose any chance of
success.

The path to success is to make the correct decisions over and over again even
if you fail the first 5 or 10 times. Of course if your definition of success
is to be a billionaire you will likely never succeed but if it's to accumulate
a reasonable amount of wealth or to achieve some measure of success in your
field then it isn't as impossible as everyone is telling you.

~~~
blablabla123
I like the comparison to poker which is a mixture of luck, skill and effort.
The thing is also, if you win a lot of times in a row or at least are on top
of the game, it is much more comfortable to play. You can continue with
calculated risks. I think that's very much a position one wants to be in to
feel successful and in control. Switching back from a disastrous round back to
this mode is tough...

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Hermel
The first example of luck they provide is how the country you are born in
makes a huge difference. Of course it does! But with such a broad definition,
even talent becomes a matter of luck, as talent requires the luck to be born
with the right genetic preconditions and the luck of growing up in a
environment that allows you to develop your talent.

A better title would be: “An overly broad definition of luck leads to luck
having a greater role in life.”

~~~
balfirevic
What kind of sensible definition of luck _wouldn 't_ include the place where
you were born?

~~~
Joe-Z
The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a
developed country ever?

I do believe that luck plays a huge role[0], but I get GP's point and I think
it's fair.

[0] I think what really drives it home for me is not knowing successful
people, but knowing people for who it didn't work out, despite them seemingly
making all the right moves.

~~~
inamesh
It's not about developed/undeveloped. It's about the possibility of your
talents being utilised in the place where you were born.

Let's say you have the potential to be a great cricketer, but you're born in a
country where cricket is not even played.

You're SOL.

Or you (the great cricketer) could be born in India and be a millionaire by
20.

~~~
Joe-Z
Great point! When typing my reply I actually wasn't sure about using
'developed countries' as the term, but it was the one that came to me fastest.
In a discussion further down the thread I just called it 'country of origin',
maybe using something like that would have been more fitting.

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awesome_dude
A lot of comments discuss Zuck's luck, but a better example would be William
Henry Gates III. Here was a kid born to a wealthy family, given a chance to
learn about computers at an early age (before he was 11!). He leveraged that
knowledge into a software business that was doing.. ok ish, whilst at Harvard.

But his luck continued when IBM decided they wanted to outsource creation of
an OS for their personal computer. He deflected IBM to another company, who,
to this day, must be kicking themselves for messing up the opportunity, only
to take on the task himself. His skills/company weren't great in that
direction, having his mother on the IBM board saved his bacon many times over.

Once he cashed that lottery ticket in, his more business minded friends saw to
it that it was exponentially more valuable than anyone could have imagined.

Whilst Bill was certainly skilled, there was more than enough luck involved
for everyone.

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netfl0
This article starts out with such broad implied definitions of “luck” it is
hard to figure out what they’re really saying.

~~~
rb808
I hate things like "Far Greater Than We Realized" too. Who thought luck wasn't
important and how long ago was that?

~~~
dang
Fortunately we can just lop that bit off the title above.

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siegeofcondor
Success in life has more to do with who you know, who your parents know and
luck than anything, even hard work or intelligence.

The more you live, the more you realize that much of life is beyond your
control. When you were born, where you were born, even the opportunities
available are all out of your control.

Not to mention that there are only a few spots for success and even if
everyone worked equally hard, most will fail while the few succeed.

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WalterBright
Jobs made 3 fortunes. One is luck, three is skill.

Gates had 3 major turning points in the fortunes of Microsoft. It's hard to
attribute all three to luck.

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wppick
I would think in certain societies luck (randomness) has much less of an
impact on peoples lives than others. Like dropping a pin somewhere in Norway
vs the US to represent where someone will be born. In the US there is may be a
pretty large amount of luck associated with where that pin lands whereas in
Norway it might be significantly less.

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A4ET8a8uTh0
Maybe part of the problem is that luck has connotations that, for better or
worse, change the way we perceive the argument. Would it make a difference if
we replaced luck with chance or probability?

Lucky sperm for example has some heavy overtones. Our language might be
getting in the way.

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foogazi
It’s not clear how talent is being measured. Is it IQ, resiliency, motivation
?

And luck goes both ways, good luck or bad luck, we are all way way luckier
just by being alive today

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friendlybus
The article lists a bunch of things you can change personally and are
therefore not "luck", like your last name, country of residence, display of
middle initials and ease of pronouncing your name.

It seems to conflate luck with randomness.

