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Comment by michaelnovati | Hacker News Reader

I saw this talk at Startup School. Honestly, as someone working in industry who tried doing a startup during school, there's a huge thing missing.

CMD+F for "luck" = 0 results.

Luck is a huge factor and sometimes you just need to move on to either something new, or working for a company to fill in the gaps, and trying again soon.

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Talking about "luck" in a presentation like this is like talking about the life benefits of physical attractiveness.

Precious little of it is in your control, so what's the point? Address what you can control, and hope for the best.

This is an interesting point, at least the initial first premise. The conclusion seems off though. In order to leverage your own assets, you need to be able to size up not only your own strengths and weakenesses, but also those of others. PA, like social status, and others of the same ilk is a real (if not always 'earned' asset). As such, you should never ignore it or be oblivious too it. It falls in a spectrum of intermediary assets -- like connections -- that you just cannot be aloof to. Understanding the odds matters -- This is just "Luck" considered as an proxy for stochastic variation. Understanding the odds is critical to strategy/rational decisionmaking under uncertainty (such as making an NPV>0 wager). There are few examples where the ability to make rational decisions under pervasive uncertainty is more important than in a startup. This (just throwing it out there) might be one reason startups fail. Or it might be one reason that contrubutes to something that was in fact mentioned (founder breakups, having a deal blow up, etc).

There is one big difference between luck and attractiveness, though. Luck is a big unknown except in hindsight. If you knew you were going to be unlucky, there's very little you could do (I hesitate to say nothing but I can't think of anything).

Luck is a big unknown except in hindsight

Tools, techniques, and strategies for dealing with "the unknown" are a fundamental part of intelligence. As a corralary, the denial of uncertainty is the most un-intelligent of strategies.

It follows that your statement has within it a bit of insight: just knowing that risk matters. So even if you can't know (with precision) your exact 'luck' at every moment, you can build upon the fact that X,Y,Z observed variable could have gone another way had P, Q, R not happened by chance. Just being aware of the magnitude of the potential variation is a useful piece of information. For example, this can guide you to more rationally hedge your bets. Or to "make luck" by managing variables to not happen by chance. Or to just know when it makes sense to keep rolling the dice -- persistence & resiliency. Etc. In this sense, Jessica did touch on something that seems to come in handy here -- resourcefullness -- just in general but in particular when the "enexpected" happens.

Luck is like time travel. Once you've done such an analysis, luck moves on to represent all those factors that you didn't take into account. That's what the word means.

PG has a good quote, how ignorance can be useful when it keeps you from making other, bigger mistakes.[1] I think this is worth keeping in mind. Does ignoring luck [2] make you better off? Its not clear ignorance is the only strategy.

______________

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html; see also

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightian_uncertainty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_process

> If you knew you were going to be unlucky, there's very little you could do

I believe the startupland term is "pivot."

Actually you control luck with determination.

By increasing determination, you decrease the effect luck has on anything you do.

And for that matter, you can control physical attractiveness. There's always something you could do if you really had to, right? Lose a little weight, gain a little weight, hide your flaws, accentuate your good points, dress a certain way. You know how sometimes on tabloid covers in the supermarket they have pictures of celebrities wearing sweats and no makeup? It's a petty thing to fixate on, but it illustrates a valuable point.

The initial analogy with physical attractiveness is broken. Physical attractiveness is akin to the intelligence you're born with. You may not be able to boost your intelligence much, but you CAN minimize the factor luck plays in you realizing your potential afforded to you by your intelligence.

Agreed, but I would put it slightly differently.

Every goal has a percentage likelihood of success, your job (as the goal-reacher) is to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes.

Ex: Moving to SF increases your luck-factor/success-percentage of meeting a VC at a coffee shop. (Assuming there are a lot of VCs at coffee shops in SF) Therefore you have become more "lucky". You have probably also reduced your luck-factor for seeing a cow in the morning.

Consider a rigged die with the probabilities for hitting any one of each of the six numbers skewed in some way. You won't be able to tell that it is the case until you roll it many times.

Consider an entrepreneur. She has the ability to build a great product. Given one day at it success may not be evident, but after months, or years of persistence, she'd (eventually) achieve the result her potential affords her.

There is nothing wrong with your examples, but it's a more narrow example.

"Luck" is showing up consistently so that you're present whenever opportunity decides to show up. Thus, you make your luck. And I believe this is where the resilience mentioned in the essay comes in; to ensure you always show up.

One of the most interesting investigations into luck was last year's show The Experiments: The Secret of Luck, by Derren Brown. The entire episode is avaiable on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4mN33w5Ftw

I would heartily recommend anyone watch it, it certainly enhanced my own understanding of the concept.

The whole resilience thing is about pushing through all the bad luck that can be expected to come along. So that you're there when the good luck comes through.

Sure, not everyone is going to make it, and the bad luck is going to finish them. But doing a presentation about waiting around for luck to strike would be extremely bad advice.

While there is variation in outcomes, people who have posted consistent results show that luck isn't the major determining factor in long-term success. Luck will change the amplitude, but it's up the skills of the founder to make sure they are always pushing through the bad times to reach the chance to succeed.

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