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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

You can do all of the above and still fail. Often, success or failure is luck-based and completely not skill-based.

I think there's two domains in this case, one being "macro luck", the other "micro luck".

The rise of the PC, or the fall of the horse buggy are in the former category. They can be influenced, but individual contributions are often insignificant, and predicting their course is very hard.

Then there's "micro luck". Things like hiring a great engineer, finding the right investor, or including the right feature or line of copy fall into this category.

With these smaller random, but not fully random events you gain the ability to influence the outcome significantly. Want to find great engineers? Move to Silicon Valley, join your LUG, get wasted at DEFCON, these all significantly increase your chances of succeeding at that particular subtask. You get to make significantly more educated guesses at what works and what doesn't.

I think this is an important distinction, after which it becomes good practice to follow the advice in the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebur

     God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
     Courage to change the things I can,
     And wisdom to know the difference.

I'm not particularly religious, but that has always seemed like good sense to me.

In a recent YC Podcast, the guest talked about luck (sorry I can't remember who it was). The interviewer asked about how much of their success can be attributed to luck. The guest agreed that, yes, there was some luck involved but luck is like collecting lottery tickets. You can take actions with your startup to increase the chances of succeeding, just like buying more lottery tickets increases your odds (by a tiny margin). You can't just start a business and wait for it to succeed or not, you have to take action and put in effort.

The role of luck explains why your startup succeeds while that of another person who works just as hard and is just as smart fails. Obviously hard work is important, but most startups have a lot of hard-working and smart people behind them, and yet still fail. Those that do succeed are very hard to predict. If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. In general people prefer to underplay the affects of chance.

> If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role.

Could it be also that maybe we are not yet aware of the myriad of other factors that also influence the outcome?

i.e. it may seem like luck but it could be something we just aren't modelling properly, unless you define luck to be precisely the "bag of unknown variables". However more than once I've seen people define luck as "that ether around us that makes lucky people lucky", kind of like an external force and not something directly related to you, your surroundings and your history.

Yes part of it is certainly hidden information, but for me luck is about how well the hidden information winds up helping you. The "ether around us that makes lucky people lucky" is a bit of a tautological definition of luck, really not sure what you mean by this. For me luck is when the variables you cannot control for work out in your favor. In physics we have what is known as the "look elsewhere effect", which is the phenomenon that if you look for new physics in many different places you are likely to find anomalies that look like new physics just due to chance. In the startup world this is roughly equivalent to saying that a startup's success was due to exceptional early founders or an exceptional idea only after that company has been successful.

Here is an example - the article says to focus on building something people want. Well how do you know you have built something people want enough to pay for before they buy it? You can't really know, which is why VCs fund a lot of companies for cheap and try to see who is lucky enough to actually be building something people want.

The conclusion of the article says that if you follow these steps you will be the master of your own fate, but this conclusion is disingenuous. It is based on looking backwards rather than forwards - all companies that succeed have made something people want and quickly increased their revenue, so all you have to do to succeed is make something people want and grow! Good luck.

Yes, it was tautological on purpose. Maybe I failed to communicate what I wanted, but basically I was trying to say that I've seen most people equate luck to something akin to a deity's intervention, i.e. luck is something that an external force thrusts upon you because destiny or whatever.

You say that "luck is when the variables that you cannot control for work out in your favor", and I kind of agree with that, except that I have doubts if they are really variables you can't control that are part of this "good luck" term.

e.g. Let's say I do great in my career because of "good luck". What amount of that luck is actually because I grew up in a family that gave me support, self-esteem, social skills, study skill, etc, even though many of those variable can't be controlled by you?

My point is (not really disagreeing much with you) that luck can be actually just a way of describing all those variables that we don't know even exist or that we don't know how to model/explain, even though they are actually stuff that CAN be influenced by you or your family, friends, etc. Kind of how we describe dark matter or dark energy, where it's actually just a placeholder term for saying "we don't really know".

So again, I do agree with you in that you could describe good luck as the set of those factors that helped you out and I guess also bad luck as those that work against you, and in that sense I also think that it's not really paiting the full picture, but unless you try to model these hidden variables, I guess it's as best a prediction as you can make to say that you need to avoid those 4 mistakes + "good luck".

You actually got me thinking a lot on this...it's an interesting topic for me I guess.

Of course you can still fail- success or failure in most things in life almost always has at least an element of luck. There are things you can control and things you can't- the best you can do is optimize the things that are under your control, hope for the best, and brace for the worst.

Maybe that's all you need, maybe not. But it'll put you in the best position to take advantage of good luck, and survive bad luck. Or, perhaps you'll be one of the lucky ones who don't need luck at all, in which case those skills had better be sharp!

Luck can be when opportunity and preparation meet. It's possible to increase the chances of those intersecting.

If it's true that luck is important, shouldn't it be 'smart' to try many 'fail fast' things so there's room in a career to fail 20-30 times and have a more reasonable shot at success?

What about those that stuck with an idea and hit gold eventually at some point? What if failing fast is too fast and you don't give an idea enough time to grow? MVPs and failing fast is an idea that started in the past ~7 years, and it works for some people and not for others.

I didn't imply there weren't other ways to make it. But there are only a few ways to hedge as an individual dev. One of them is to shoot with a shotgun. It's more or less what incubators attempt to do, but spread out over times since each of us only has one brain to go around.

There's no data to indicate that that way is superior to any other way.

Absolutely, and that's why there is the term "MVP". It's easy to get sucked into thinking "Before anyone will buy it, <x> must be done". That is false thinking 99% of the time.

You need to get out a product, and get it out fast. Keep your feet moving, talk to users, and build in the direction they want.

Sometimes there's an argument that following the advice reduces your chances of failure. Ultimately like most things in life, it's a healthy dose of luck combined with hard work.

Read about the four types of luck.

By doing more & learning more & meeting more people, you essentially increase your luck surface area in 3 different ways, increasing the odds you'll get lucky.

Many founders I've seen 'got lucky' when they were on the way to the 100th trip to meet customers. Did they get lucky or did they make their luck?

It bothers me people proclaim the importance of luck to successful startups. Usually it is either sour grapes at someone else's success, or conversely, an act humility from someone who is successful.

But in either case I don't find it to be a useful sentiment. The fact is that as entrepreneurs we have agency to make decisions, and we each have uniquely imperfect information on which to base those decisions. "Luck" is nothing more than this universal phenomenon of imperfect information. What might be luck for one person might not be for another. At the end of the day, lucky or not, we are all tossed about by the whims of fortune. That should not blunt our drive, or check our decisions, or detract from our accomplishments. Sincerely acknowledging luck is an admirably humble thing to say in a press conference, but luck as a concept will not help you take the best action for the future.

I like the way Richard Hamming stated a similar sentiment:

" I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, ``Luck favors the prepared mind.'' And I think that says it the way I believe it. There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn't. The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not."

Full Talk: http://blog.samaltman.com/you-and-your-research

If your understanding of success is "be an entrepreneur who makes decisions", then there is no luck involved. But that is not most entrepreneurs' understanding of success. So this isn't about making decisions, it's about having those decisions be accepted and rewarded by a reactionary and fickle culture. And that takes a lot of luck.

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