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Comment by div | Hacker News Reader

Maybe to a lesser extent on Hacker news, but I have definitely heard people attributing success to luck or just being at the right place at the right time more then a few times.

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And not just that. A pattern I've been more consciously noticing recently (I'm sure it has been there the whole time but that I've just been noticing it more often for some reason) is the huge tendency for people to not just attribute success to luck but to attribute success to luck and failure to error/inherent crappiness, and to do so much more often than they are willing to attribute success to avoidance of error and an inherent goodness and attribute failure to bad luck.

I suspect this stems from some kind of ego factor in that when others succeed one wants it to be due to luck and not some factor that makes the other person "better" than they are, and that when others fail one wants it to be due to the other person being "worse" than they are.

Edit: I must admit that I've seen more and more of this on HN as its audience grows and changes, which is rather unfortunate. :(

Isn't it the whole thesis of the Outliers book?

Yes it is.

Hard Work + Luck. The right circumstances let Gates have access to the right technology where he could then put in 10,000 hours of hard work etc.

Luck is a necessary but insufficient condition.

I think most lottery winners find luck to be quite sufficient. I think what you mean to say is that luck is by definition scarce, so depending solely on it showing up is likely to be a losing strategy.

Fooled by Randomness also hits on this theme, and it's not nearly as annoying as a Gladwell book.

I actually didn't take "right place and time" to be the sole theme of Outliers although I did think the confusing way in which the book was written suggested that.

I read from it a combination of the two. In a rambling way it said that in order to even be eligible for an "outlier" outcome you needed to have done the 10k+ hours but that doing the 10k+ hours was not enough.

i.e. Skill & work is necessary but not sufficient to end up building an outlier result like Google/Apple/Facebook/Goldman Sachs etc.

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