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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

The harder I work the luckier I am.

That saying is really what this article is getting at. There are a lot of opportunities that happen in life. What people CALL luck is highly dependent upon taking action when an opportunity is presented. What the article is saying is that the people we consider lucky are more likely to take advantage of an opportunity. Maybe some people are more lucky than others (I mean stats would suggest that this is likely true), but they may not be the people we generally consider lucky.

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But that's what I'm saying in my comment, I even directly address the issue of hard work. To be a hard worker implies all sorts of luck on its own. If you're a hard worker you've probably grown up in an environment where either the value of hard work was present and its importance was impressed on you explicitly or you've learned implicitly by having contact with hard workers and contact with not hard workers where the hard workers were rewarded and the not hard workers weren't (which btw does not happen all the time). Both of those situations take a lot of luck! You're a hard worker, I totally believe that, but that doesn't eliminate or even reduce the role of luck in your life, it masks it, the luck is just further back, playing a role in the development of a hard-work attitude in the first place.

e: So maybe instead of thinking of it like "I'm lucky because I work hard" perhaps we should think of it like "I work hard because I'm lucky."

It's more like "Seek and you shall find". Or "the last place you look is the first place you find."

You might be lucky enough to be born on top of a geyser of bubbling crude. If not, you need to go prospecting, not sit and wait for it to come to you.

This type of "seeking" behavior is easier to justify when you can afford to take more risks. Consider the stock market adage "Never invest what you can't afford to lose."

Travel the farthest afield when you have nothing left to lose.

But isn't luck is being in the right place at the right time? If so, a sensible approach is to find the right place and just hang around...

(Unless the right time was last week, in which case you're out of luck.)

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