Why Success is more Luck than Hard Work

My main issue with this narrative that work hard != success is that it looks at the upper tier of a profession. You don't have to be a CEO or a professional hockey player to be successful. It's trendy to say this for some reason, but the people saying it don't believe it. The author of the post literally has 3 degrees (undergrad, masters and MBA). He works as VP and head of M&A of a $5.2bn company. He doesn't believe this crap. He's worked hard and probably prides himself on being successful. But he peddles this crap on LI for some reason to discourage others from having any hopes or ambitions. Why?

And it's backed up by mostly BS:

> How about the role that luck plays in career success? Three Italian professors created a model to track the success of 1,000 individuals over a series of lucky and unlucky events spanning 40-year careers. The result?

Papers like this get thrown around a lot as evidence of something. I was curious about this one since I don't know how you can measure "talent". He made it sound like a longitudinal study. If you actually read the paper [0], it amounts to nothing more than someone creating a model of the world as they think it is, run the simulation, say the world looks different than the simulation I just made up, so something.

Here are their assumptions:

> We consider N individuals, with talent Ti (intelligence, skills, ability, etc.) normally distributed in the interval [0, 1] around a given mean mT with a standard deviation σT , randomly placed in fixed positions within a square world (see Figure 1) with periodic boundary conditions (i.e. with a toroidal topology) and surrounded by a certain number NE of ”moving” events (indicated by dots), someone lucky, someone else unlucky (neutral events are not considered in the model, since they have not relevant effects on the individual life)

It makes for a nice headline, but this isn't science.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07068.pdf

It’s luck and hard work usually. Sometimes folks get lucky. Sometimes hard work alone pays off. Usually you need both for big success.

False dichotomies are lazy.

I think the famous Gary Player quote is relevant here: "The more I practice, the luckier I get."

If you work hard and have a positive mindset, you're much more likely to get lucky than you would by just slacking off or having a negative mindset.

“Things worthwhile generally don’t just happen. Luck is a fact, but should not be a factor. Good luck is what is left over after intelligence and effort have combined at their best. Negligence or indifference are usually reviewed from an unlucky seat. The law of cause and effect and causality both work the same with inexorable exactitudes. Luck is the residue of design.”

Branch Rickey

The one thing I’ve noticed of all successful people is they used some form of arbitrage at some point, and this can often be mistaken for luck. This is what makes the difference from a person that has merely worked hard.

Sure whatever helps you accept the fact you're just mediocre. The world is extremely competitive.