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Comment by Aisen8010 | Hacker News Reader

Quantity of luck has a bigger role to achieve success.

This is such an impotent and sour-grapes refrain that someone always has to blurt out in any thread about “success”. Of course luck plays a huge role in success just as it does for all asymmetric outcomes in a chaotic environment. Just ask any formerly living thing over the last billion years about its fortunes. Shit happens, you can’t control it.

However focusing on what you can’t control is to nullify your competitive advantage as a human: your brain. There’s a reason they say “luck favors the prepared mind”. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and play the hand you were dealt.

I don't think it follows that he feels sorry for himself. This bias in human thought could use correcting for several reasons. It runs a bit like the "just world" fallacy. On one side, you have things like the Republican party, where millions vote against their own interests on the basis of a delusion of control. Then you have the general lack of social safety nets in America, because of the just-world fallacy that people get what they deserve. Then, you have people like Jeff Bezos who credit themselves with deserving their wealth and lead companies with delivery drivers peeing in bottles not to get fired.

As a species, focusing on our competitive advantage has brought us to 100 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock: https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/ .

You are still buying into the assumption that this person is not "successful" just because they said luck is more important than these abilities.

1. You're projecting all of that. You're even assuming the person you're talking to is not "successful" with no basis whatsoever.

2. You're misusing "sour grapes" -- you don't know what it means.

3. You're hyphenating "sour grapes" -- you don't know how it's spelled.

You're right that I'm projecting. This is based on personal experience many individuals I've known who have made this complaint while lacking self-awareness of how their own attitudes and victim mentality have caused them to miss opportunities, so then their "bad luck" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On your other points, you are wrong. I hyphenated "sour-grapes" due its use as an adjective.

What's your excuse for getting the meaning wrong

But we can control societal factors that cause success to be inequitably distributed. Through worker organization, redistribution of wealth, etc.

It’s just that individuals that have benefited from this false meritocracy have a vested interest in the rest of us “hustling” at the individual level instead of banding together to change the system for everyone.

"Luck playing a part" is not the same as a false meritocracy.

It wasn't claimed to be.

Focussing on communications is a premature optimization when it comes to success, or helping people become more successful.

The most influential aspects of being successful is an ancestral history of wealth and success along with luck.

The comment comes up because it's akin to focussing on some micro-optimizations in bubble sort instead of using quick sort

I just finished reading this biography of the physicist Enrico Fermi, "The Pope of Physics" and while he was obviously very talented from a young age, there were a lot of points in his career from Italy to the United States where luck played a critical role. He was lucky that he was taken under the wing of a senior academic early on, well before he became famous or did any really significant work. That figure ensured that he and several other young physicists got academic appointments (when others tried equally hard to block those appointments, and put their favored proteges in those slots). He was also lucky that he was able to escape fascist Italy with his Jewish wife, and emigrate to the United States.

However, it also kind of backs up the thesis here, as Fermi apparently worked very hard to lose his Italian accent once in America, as a means of more effectively communicating with the locals. He then became the leader of the Chicago reactor project, then an all-around consultant for the Los Alamos Manhattan Project.

"Chance favors the prepared mind" - one of my favorite quotes. The point being, chances come your way every day, and you need to be prepared to grab them.

The sentiment may lose its power if factors like inequality and racism make the chances available wildly different for disadvantaged subsets of society.

Hearing such quotes may be to them insult to injury if coming from well born or huge outliers (that got 1/million lucky).

Even the most disadvantaged should still prepare themselves. And ideally get extra help, without pretense, from those who never had to face their precarious circumstances.

Fair, unfortunately this is not something one can substantially improve upon ;)

But you can. The catch phrase for this is "increasing your luck surface area"

There are all kinds of possibilities and opportunities in front of us every day. We're "lucky" when we can a) identify them and b) take advantage of them.

There are lots of strategies for this ranging from the simple (learn more) to the complex (networking, the people kind) and everything can give you additional perspective, opportunities, etc, etc to make you "lucky." As you're successful with a few, you can build momentum, reputation, etc to grow your "luck"

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