I’ve been helped by many, deserved and undeserved.
But to remove the role of agency from success is an overreaction.
The extreme right says life is a perfec meritocracy. The extreme left says it’s all down to luck and power dynamics. As usual, they are both wrong and it’s a healthy mix of both.
But since agency is the only thing you control, it’s best to focus on that.
Viktor E. Frankl
He would say he was lucky.
Viktor Frankl is an amazing example of someone taking an absolutely shit situation and applying some agency to it to make it better. My entire point is even he had good and bad luck, and chose not to focus on that, but on his zone of control, his agency.
If it is in fact your contention that Viktor Frankl - Viktor Frankl - was lucky, then there's really no point in any further discussion.
I’m not demeaning his agency everything is written but if he wasn’t lucky, we wouldn’t be able to read anything he wrote about his experience.
A man in the most unlucky circumstances looked for the ways in which he was indeed lucky, and then went on to turn that into a good outcome.
Pure agency. Luck had nothing to do with it.