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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.

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Lots of people hustle and prep who are not rich. Luck is largest factor and its usually the luck of already being in a position to capitalize on opportunities.

I think it's a mistake to assume that just because something is a skill it's not influenced by "luck".

For example, from what I understand, in the big five model of personality, conscientiousness is over 40% heritable.

Anecdotally, I remember how even in the first grade there were kids that were clearly low in conscientiousness and kids who were clearly high in conscientiousness.

Pretty sure the kids in the latter group didn't instill a work ethic into themselves by age 6.

I hope that it's possible to develop conscientiousness as an adult, at least to some degree, but clearly it is something that you can be born into.

I'm using "conscientiousness" as an example, I don't think it's the same thing as "hustle", in fact I'd even suspect that there's some conflict between the two.

However, my point is that development of skills aren't independent from luck, since we all are dealt different cards with which we then have to play.

Being prepared doesn't mean anything unless 1 happens. Hustling => success and preparation => success are dependent on lucky opportunities.

No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).

Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with preparation or hustle.

IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare 100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to better opportunities.

> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?

You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever work you are putting in?

Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if done right, sometimes) increases your odds.

What if you hustle and all you get is bad luck?

I think one of you is saying that neutral situations should allow one to scramble up just due to willpower alone. I'm not sure I agree.

But some people are born with one foot in a bucket. They just keep getting hit by sic relatives and floods and what have you and everything they get never lasts.

> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)

In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.

If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.

Hustle and preparation are very important, lucking into wealth vastly outweighs those factors, because a) it provides room to fail and b) it makes it easy to hire the busy and well-prepared.

Try playing multiple games of monopoly with 4 or 5 friends (or run monte carlo simulations if you want a fun machine learning project, since Monopoly is a game that can easily be taught to computers), but randomly assign one player 10x the starting capital and $2000 every time they pass go instead of the normal $200.

Of course not, but you still have to either be born as the type of person who would seek out and hone this skill, or have been born into a situation where someone showed you this and you were naturally receptive to it.

I had a coworker who went to Stanford on scholarships. The thing that surprised him about all the rich kids there was how prepared they were for life already. It was no wonder to him how they get ahead and stay ahead, and it wasn't just money.

But one of my theories in life is that power is money, not the other way around. We know that's something that the newly rich run into over and over. We even have movies with that story arc.

'They' are all too happy to see us get hung up on how much money we're going to allow them to have. They'll still be just as powerful and influential. Probably the easiest thing they spend that 'currency' on is to have enough money to cover the exchange rate with people outside their circles.

"Fortune favors the prepared mind."

not

"Fortune rewards the prepared mind."

Although the latter is effectively Calvinism, which the US culture was founded on. It will probably echo through the ages.

I've never heard Calvinism talk about either "fortune" or the "prepared mind". I get that you're denigrating Calvinism here rather than making a precise statement, but what part of Calvinism are you referring to? The Calvinists I know would be more likely to say that God willed your situation or gave you the preparation for your mind. This is more akin to fate than fortune. ("Fate" being what will inevitably happen, and "fortune" being chance events.)

If you work hard and sacrifice you will be rewarded. Frequently it is presented as quid pro quo.

At the end of the day if you work hard and do well, you could still have been lucky. Rather than that negating all of your hard work, a better reaction to this fact is a bit of charity for others. And I’m not talking donations, I’m talking about being a decent person and not judging others who haven’t got what you got.

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