Ask HN: How much in charge of your reality are you and how much is chance?

This starts with how good your decisions are. Putting imprudence aside, do we really know what's good for us? My conclusion is that if your judgement is so good on the critical questions (such as investment) that you score 54% vs 50% for a coin flip; you're a star.

I knew a fella who made all his decisions by coin flip for a couple of years and said afterward that he didn't really notice a difference - he couldn't say he wasn't either better or worse off for doing that.

There is some good research on this, if you include the luck of being born into the American money-aristocracy luck is huge.