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Comment by saltyfamiliar | Hacker News Reader

Your ability to work hard is dependent on things like your nutrition, genetic temperament, and general outlook on life as developed by your parents, friends, mentors and life experiences. It's not just a magical innate ability that exists if you believe hard enough. This type of thinking becomes a problem when you begin associating "working hard" with having a superior moral character that deserves to be rewarded while other less good individuals can suck eggs.

It really is all luck.

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I mean, it really is all luck that we are born with a giant star providing us energy to sustain life on earth. You’re absolutely right. Lucked out with this beautiful sun!

We talk past each other when we do not specify the domain of the topic under discussion. At the highest abstraction it’s luck. We are lucky to have born as humans and not somewhere at the bottom of the food chain.

It’s impossible to have a productive conversation with these analogies and subjectivity of which abstraction layer we are talking about.

What this thread is about - “Nothing is in our control and everything is luck”. That’s a dull and uninteresting observation IMO. Also really uninspiring take on life and pursuit of excellence.

Maybe it's dull and uninteresting but unless you keep it in mind at every layer of abstraction, you run the risk of drawing incorrect conclusions. People tend to recognize this fundamental lack of control in only the most obvious cases like familial wealth, race, nationality, iq etc.. but completely ignore it in the more subtle and important distinctions between people like early childhood experiences, stress in the household, metabolism, serotonin levels, emotional tendencies and intellectual influences. The sheer complexity involved in all of these factors causes them to be treated differently and unfairly reduced to "idk some people just get ahead in life because they work harder."

I partial agree, it's complex. Meritocracy is better than ever and most things in life can be directly deduced to initiative, work ethics, personal drive, ambition and ability to have self control. There is an amazing book "Deep Work" that goes in-depth the work ethics of successful people.

You also left out the biggest and the most important luck factor - Physical attractiveness. There are several studies in the field of psychology to mundane daily anecdotal evidence of how attractive people have a lottery ticket. I don't see this as a negative thing - genetic diversity is literally how human's evolve and natural selection works.

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