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Comment by chrischen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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