Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

What bothers me is just how much luck factors into absolutely everything. The family and region you are born in determines so much about your life that individual contributions seem laughable in comparison. Even then, your individual characteristics are heavily based on the former as well, in the form of nature and nurture. Even the ideas you might cultivate are the result of happening on the right resource at the right time. Lastly, it becomes harder and harder to explain the successes of outliers without it being mostly about luck and the environment. The notion of free will is under assault from all corners. Not to mention that apparently the brain makes decisions before the thought comes to your conscious awareness...

Talking about luck is often instinctively interpreted as a method to avoid responsibility and cultivate laziness, but try as I might, ignoring this aspect of the world feels like a type of wishful religious thinking that is torn apart after even the most cursory investigation and thought. Generally, people will tend to attribute the bad things to luck and the good things to their own efforts, but in reality both seem to fall under the same purview.

The internship I got for my job was posted on our statewide college job board. My employer posted the position in a city 120 miles away from me. I still applied because I figured I could suck it up and do that for a summer. Turns out they needed someone in the exact city I was in because they also operated near my school as well. Also they wanted to extend it year round as well even though the posting just said "Summer."

When you say it comes down to luck, it pretty much does. I'm fairly certain, if not 100% sure I was chosen simply because I was the only one in my area that applied. All the other positions in the location 120 miles away were filled and nobody wanted to move to my city. So to make things simple, they just chose me, a fresh OOP learned programmer with little to no skills except for writing a basic linked list in java.

I have a similar story. My first year of college I worked two 40 hour/week jobs during the summer and a 30 hour a week job during the school year. I was determined to get a well paying internship so I could reduce my work hours and still pay for school.

There was a snow storm during the day of the spring career fair. Classes were cancelled but the career fair still happened. I was one of the only ones that showed up and passed along my resume to all of the tech companies that attended the career fair. Had it not been for the snow storm I would not have received an internship which led to my first time job. I was a college freshman, B student due to having to work and I had zero practical coding skills outside of one semester of C++. The snow storm was certainly luck but showing up at the career fair was not.

However, much of my classmates in the dorm chose to play in the snow and I chose to go to the career fair. Luck does play a role but luck is really putting yourself in a position to take advantage of opportunity. If everyone that lived on campus showed up at that career fair I don't know if I would be in the position I am today (25 years later).

It's funny how that works. Having run the college gambit before getting an associates degree in business, I learned what was important and what wasn't in college. I knew an internship was practically vital if not required. So like another class I put in a lot of time to apply to as many positions as I could. Many students I'd talk to would always seem frustrated the moment I or someone else would bring up an internship and that was because they were more worried about working at their current job and graduating debt free. I at least had the foresight to know that the experience in this field was worth more any amount of interest I'd have to pay simply because you're income potential far outweighs the maybe few thousands in interest you would've saved working full-time.

Plus, it has an exponential distribution (survivorship bias, compounding). The shape of the curve seems to be trending over time. We're being sorted on a global scale. This isn't a new phenomenon. Genes, social status, geography, always played a role. But, it's quickening because of the Internet and globalization. One used to be considered lucky to have born with a 120 IQ. But, nowadays, a 120 IQ is the entry fee.

Most people have enough luck in their life to change it for the better. Part of intelligence is being prepared to take advantage of it when it you encounter your luck.

But that's what I'm saying. The wisdom and intelligence you end up with plus the knowledge of using this concept of preparedness are all to a great if not total extent determined by randomness. For me to exploit this, many factors have had to come together without any conscious input on my part.

A bit like a rock becoming sentient right after being thrown and believing that it is flying

Besides, is the first idea even true? Most people who have ever lived were hunter gatherers. The majority of people alive today live in shitty conditions that they are unlikely to fundamentally ameliorate. And if they manage to change their attitude about it, it will tend to be a factor of their innate personality and influences

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