And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men | Hacker News Reader

And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men

theatlantic.com

93 pointshudibras80 comments

Luck matters. It has always mattered.

http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/

Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life.

Before this discussion gets too far down the usual track, it's useful to remember the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes.

Is luck necessary for success? At the super-high level, yes. In fact at the low level, yes. Being born in the USA or the anglosphere or in a wealthy country is a massive stroke of luck.

Is luck sufficient for success? No. Ask any lottery winner.

Now to all the other things people list -- intelligence, personality and the like.

Is an anxious drive to achieve necessary? At that level, it would seem so.

Is it sufficient? No. It's not; no matter how ambitious you are it's going to be difficult to transcend some starting conditions.

Exactly. Luck is necessary, but not sufficient, for massive success.

But on a deeper level, the big problem with the "luck vs. talent" debate is that we have done a pretty decent job quantizing talent -- but we haven't done so with luck. We treat "luck" as this singular, mystical force. In truth, luck is reducible to further components, just as talent is reducible to constituents like intelligence, practice, ambition, curiosity, etc.

There are different types of luck. There's luck on a macroscopic scale, such as being born into a stable family with access to necessary resources. There's luck on a microscopic scale, such as the circumstances surrounding each encounter over the course of one's day (e.g., who happens to be in line with you at Starbucks, or who's sitting next to you on a plane). And then there's the crucial component of how you expose and act on the luck. (You may never realize that your seatmate is the CEO of a hot startup unless you manage to strike up an amiable conversation; in this case, you need to expose and "uncover" the luck around you in order to take advantage of it).

Truly dumb luck -- like discovering you're the long lost heir to a megafortune, or winning the lottery, or being discovered at a restaurant by a talent agent -- is fairly rare, and at any rate, one can't count on it.

Given all of the above, what makes for an ideal luck strategy? Go through life assuming you're lucky, but that your luck is hidden from plain sight. It needs to be uncovered.

Go through life assuming you're lucky, but that your luck is hidden from plain sight. It needs to be uncovered.

And, of course, try to maximize the number of encounters with potentially lucky circumstances.

That can be a costly strategy.

Waitressing in LA pays terribly.

To everybody, I highly recommend reading Nassim Taleb's book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, which can be summarised (poorly) like this:

1) Things are more unpredictably random than you think

2) Yes, even if you're aware of 1)

I second the recommendation.

I'd say a better summary has to mention that there 2 types of random "things": some are predictably random (Mediocristan), and some are aren't, they're prone to Black Swans (Extremistan).

It's the latter type of randomness that we have to worry about: avoid being exposed to bad black swans (e.g. don't put all your money in the stock market), and try to be exposed to good black swans, but don't depend on it.

When ever I see stories or articles detailing what people have done to make their fortune, I try to think of it as: what have these people done, and then in-spite of these decisions still made their fortune.

Luck, chance and timing make a huge part of any endeavour. But if you don't put yourself there you will never succeed.

The risk is that either those who do well, or those that want to emulate them, suffer from selection bias - and end up thinking that they succeed because they followed a 'formula' that they controlled. Whereas really they put themselves in the path of luck.

Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life.

In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind -- Louis Pasteur

Also:

"Chance favours the connected mind." -- Steven Johnson

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...

Being born in the USA is a lucky event, but it's not 100% luck. As a nation of immigrants, it's likely that one's ancestors took great risks and busted their collective asses to get to and succeed in America. To the extent that one inherits the genes of these immigrants, being born in the USA can partially be attributed to "your" hard work, where "you" is defined as a collection of genetic patterns.

Of course it's not all rosy: many early American settlers emigrated to flee religious persecution, which is another way of saying that they were fanatic nutjobs. In effect, Europe deported its religous fundamentalism to the gene pool of the US, and the effects can be seen to this day. Lucky Europe!

I'd definitely count being born to hard working parents as 100% luck.

Only if you're inheriting all their wealth.

For every successful person who can attribute their success to the work ethic their parents taught them, there are ten losers and twenty disappointed yet hard working parents.

Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life.

You can certainly choose to take risks to meet interesting people, which risks embarassment, rather than jumping off barn tops and risk dying. Similarly, you can choose to tinker with transistors, rather than trying to get rich by going deep in debt and invest in real estate.

I consider these to be examples of playing the cards, not the hand itself.

The torture the analogy still further:

The "hand" is things like your place and family of birth, your inherited traits, the stability and safety of your upbringing, the quality of your education, your peers and so on.

The "playing" of the hand is things like:

* Taking advantage of US citizenship to much more easily obtain residency and jobs in the tech sector capitals of SV and NYC.

* Taking advantage of a gregarious nature to meet people, shake hands, become known.

* Seizing the chance to work with people you met at high school or in college.

And so on. The total space of all choices and outcomes is greatly narrowed by elements outside of perceptible detection and control ("luck"); but what's left is still a very large set.

You can surely call that playing the cards, the difference with actual cards, is that you can't reliably calculate probabilities, and avoiding too large harm is a good strategy in that case.

Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. There are so many types of walks of life experienced by tens of millions in the USA that consist of suffering unimaginable to a person doing well. Poverty here is especially harsh because, spatially, you're so close to those occupying privileged positions and living their dreams, that it always seems as if it could be you, and it seems that way to those on both sides of the divide.

> Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success.

I suspect that US-born tech entrepreneur "successes" would come close to outnumbering all other countries of origin put together.

And being poor in the USA is still streets ahead of poverty in almost every country on earth. In the USA it often means an unpleasant life. Elsewhere it frequently means you die as an infant. It's pretty hard to become a tech CEO at 20 if you died when you were 5.

> US-born tech entrepreneur "successes" would come close to outnumbering all other countries of origin put together

If you include "tech" in the phrase, ok. But there are other fields of business than tech.

There are fewer conglomerates in the rest of the world than the US, and more people needing to be served by independent businesses. With more entrepreneurial endeavors per capita, there is a higher ratio of entrepreneurs founding and operating them. I'd guess that as a ratio, I bump into more entrepreneurs on the streets in Douala, Cameroon, than I do in Dayton, Ohio.

> streets ahead

Ha -- http://britishisms.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/streets-ahead/

> Ha

I'm Australian, our English is more closely related to British English than the American dialect is.

"And being poor in the USA is still streets ahead of poverty in almost every country on earth. "

Except for being poor in most of Europe, which is quite a few countries.

But it's true there is an entrepreneurial spirit in the US that isn't matched anywhere else that I know of. Note that I don't know much about places like Taiwan.

I said "most countries" and I meant it. There are, depending on the geopolitical weather in NYC, something like 200-ish countries. Maybe 30 or 40 of those are legitimately wealthy. The USA, the wider anglosphere, Japan and Western Europe.

I think the parent post meant that the relative difference in wealth is way more apparent in the US (vs in a third world country where all your neighbours are poor like you would be).

But yes, in absolute terms, i would rather the sort of poverty in the US than the sort of famine in parts of africa.

The ginii coefficient measures the inequality inside countries.

Compared to most of the world, the US has indeed more inequality.

But there are some places (i.e Brazil and South Africa) with much higher inequality, where the wealth of some and the poverty of others are much more juxtaposed and in your face.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GINIretouchedcolors.png

That's an understatement. Being poor in the US (by the official US definition) is better than being poor almost anywhere else.

This paper goes so far as to argue that, in many ways, the average poor American lives at the same level or better than an European middle class person:

http://www.timbro.se/bokhandel/pdf/9175665646.pdf

I prefer my reports on relative standards of living, particularly those concerned with welfare and the poor, not to come from libertarian think tanks.

They tend to have just a hint of bias.

Whenever these kinds of discussions come up on HN , I notice two cognitive biases which always end up derailing the discussion .

One is where people think that they're infact quite talented and deserving of success its just that their luck wasn't favorable .

The other group is people who've worked their way out of pretty difficult circumstances and find explaining away everything as luck unacceptable at some level . This makes people want to believe in a certain position and triggers long arguments . Its a similar thing to the nature nurture debates that happen frequently on HN .

Let me give you guys an example . One day a friend told me that theres a really cool site called Hacker News which I should check out . I initially didnt understand most of the stuff people here were talking about but suffice to say that its changing my outlook on things . So maybe just maybe if I ever make it big wouldnt this count as luck ?

Another thing being that I have an interest in music . But when I was young I just never got around to learning the fundamentals . I'm teaching myself now but if someone musically knowledgeable was around me when I was young I'm quite sure I would be quite deeply into music by now .

Let me go deeper . Why this interest in music ? I had a small keyboard I always used to play with . What if it wasnt there ? Then later on more recently I saw someone play live which rekindled my interest and started me learning . If I hadnt seen that maybe I wouldnt be so interested . So yeah luck pretty much nudges us down different streams . But your swimming ability matters too ...

Life being an infinite graph search over an almost infinite search space of possibilities a randomised algorithm seems to be what nature prefers . Thats how evolution works by using luck to its advantage . The ultimate lucky stroke could be , that evolution gave rise to our species in the first place but then you could say that the rabbit hole goes far deeper ....

I'm currently reading Warren Buffet's biography, Snowball.

A lot of it has taken me by surprised. My long standing idea of Buffett was that he was careful and prudent, but I'm surprised to learn how highly intellegent he was. the book references how easy school/college was and that he was the only one to get an A+ in Ben Graham's class. It was also very interesting at how OBSESSED he was with earning money, from a very young age, all his efforts revolved around how he could earn more and more money.

All that to say, there were a lot of serendipitous aspects to buffet's success, but I think more so he was just an extremely unique individual able to combine 1. very smart 2. very ambitious 3. very concerned with increasing his capitol.

> "I've had all this good fortune," Buffett says. "It starts with being born in this country, though. It starts with being born male in 1930."

Source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2104309,00.html

I'm sure there were plenty of intelligent women out there who are just as intelligent, just as smart and just as hard working as Buffett but who never got their own shot. Buffett may be good. But so are many other people.

As were many others who weren't as lucky as Buffett

I agree with the view of Buffet as extraordinarily intelligent. If you generalize intelligence to the ability to mentally model and make good predictions about dynamic systems (such as companies and markets in this case), and recognize that humans have a great variance in the types and degrees of expression of such ability, it makes sense that there would be a handful of people who can almost literally see the future, from the point of view of the rest of us with less insight.

Given that most people working tech in the valley haven't hit a lot of significant roadblocks, this is a great parable for HN to find compassion - we too often write off the less fortunate as merely less talented or hard working.

The danger comes when, by emphasizing the fortune in the equation, we cause the "less fortunate" to stop trying.

Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow.

> Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow.

The above statement is logically inconsistent.

No, it isn't, unless you are assuming only circumstance or only "karma" can affect one's path in life. Nothing of the sort was either stated or implied.

Every single successful person had many near death experiences, and there are many alternate universes where they aren't well known, and in fact the famous names in those universes are ones we don't know about in ours.

The folks we look up to as "successful" in our observable universe are generally folks who:

  1. Won the Ovarian Lottery.
  2. Used their time well.
  3. Didn't quit.
  4. Didn't get killed for a long enough period of time to achieve accomplishments greater than most people.

Success is not accidental. Sure, you need #1 + #4, but you also need #2 + #3.

That seems to suggest successful people run greater risks of dying than the average. I don't think that would hold to a statistical analysis, perhaps it would even show the opposite trend (poor people die more often). If it were true, we'd see a lot more famous people being murdered or dying from stress or disease or something similar, as opposed to just now and then managing to kill themselves with drugs and other things of their own undoing.

A similar article was discussed yesterday on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174334 (some good comments there for people who missed it ):

My opinion is that success is always accidental. You are the product of your DNA and your environment. There are no great men. Only great situations (see multiple origin of inventions/scientific progress/businesses).

Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.

One important stroke of luck is to believe that it's not luck.

I've been gestating an essay about "useful lies" for a while now. Some things that we know aren't truly true are embraced as if they are true because of the utility of doing so.

So for example, believing that success is not related to luck. It's untrue, in my estimation. But if you truly accept it you wind up with silly notions like Insha'Allah and nothing much gets achieved.

Or take realism/legalism in law. Sure, judges are biased, judges affect policy yadda yadda. But actually embracing that reality makes the legal system work less well. Meanwhile, "strict and complete legalism" is a bit of a nonsense, but judges who embrace it have higher utility because their judgements are more likely to be respected and accepted.

The reason I haven't written it is because I've kinda written it already[1] and I can't think of a better way to explain what I'm trying to convey.

I'm also deeply uncomfortable with being caught between the essential unknowability of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me.

[1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

Not really. I'm talking to you because I'm a middle-class male, who studies technology/science in the year 2013.

That's pretty lucky.

Does that make want to give up - throw my hands up in the air and say - What will be will be? Hell no.

I merely appreciate the gifts I've been given. I try not to attribute any success to my own hard work and study, and I try to do the best with what I have got. Knowing that my existence is particularly random/arbitrary doesn't really change what I do. It merely changes how I see the world around me.

Same way I view the universe really. Its existence is fairly random. There really isn't really any point to it. It'll eventually die, and so will everyone else I know. Does that make me say - What's the point - nothing matters? Not really.

It makes me cherish everything I've been given (life/liberty/health), it emboldens me to enjoy the little life that I have been given.

Life is pretty amazing. It's also pretty random. I revel in the arbitrariness of it all while I can.

Like I say: it's a useful untruth. The reaction varies from person to person.

And some of it is I think evolved. Optimism is the grease that oils capitalism, probably because optimistic ancestors took risks that in some cases paid off. Sure, most optimists failed horribly. But the payoffs for the lucky ones were sufficiently high to offset the cost. Thus optimism can become a dominant strategy. (I'm spitballing; the problem with evopsych is that it's all smart-sounding just-so stories that can't be tested).

I mean I'm in the same boat. I'm working on a product which is specifically connected to questions of luck, risk, variance, human bias and so forth. If I am honest with myself the base rate / reference class forecast is that I will probably fail horribly. The rational thing to do would be to present my credentials at a big company.

And yet ...

I've been thinking about that idea as well. Would it make sense to see them less as "useful lies" and more as "self-referential truths", wherein the statement can be either true or false depending on whether or not it is accepted axiomatically?

That's an interesting line of thought to stew on; thank you. :)

Yeah, it's still not the best way to put it, it's kind of tautological in itself. Maybe the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy fits better.

I'd strongly recommend the book Fooled by Randomness (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Mark...) for a very entertaining look at the role of chance both in "success" in the financial markets and life in general.

One of the few books I can honestly say had a significant impact on how I approach a lot of every day situations.

This reminds me of Peter Thiel's lecture on the question of luck.[1]

A focus and care for topics like what this article discusses often falls into the optimistic indeterminism quadrant that he outlines -- ie. we're optimistic about a future that we find largely out of our control, ie. is approaching fairly randomly but we feel good about it. The worry he outlines is that we may be at risk of falling into "pessimistic indeterminism", where Japan has existed for some time and much of Europe, ie. we don't feel good about a future we can't control.

I agree that yes many things are indeterminate, and perhaps I can use this knowledge and attempt to take actions to mitigate the bad-unknowns, and not get too angry if things don't always work out, however beyond this what are the lessons to be learned here? I always fear that confirmation bias will take root and a common reaction to articles like this become, "oh, they were just lucky, so my current course [probably of inaction] could also lead to similar success given random chance..."

No, that's not what it's saying. Perhaps I'm a deterministic pessimist?

[1] http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...

Life's course can be explained by agency and environment. We all know environment, including luck, is important. But what motivates people to write agency out of the picture? Agency is what makes us distinctly human.

Perhaps by belittling agency, people feel better about their own disappointments?

Here's why environment is important.

Random man from environment picks up gun and shoots you point blank without warning. Agency your way out of that little pickle.

Or how about - you're a black woman in the year 1900. I'm sorry did you have a future?

The amount of things I can list here are endless. You might even be 1 in a million. Too bad there are 1000s of other just like you.

You are the least important factor in your success.

I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life. Myself, I come from a poor rural area that many people of my peer group did not escape. I'm proud of my life today, though it is not perfect. I can say it was damned hard to get here and I am happy to be here.

What role did agency play in separating my more successful peers from the ones at home in their parents' trailers with no meaningful occupation, often accompanied by unplanned children and drug problems? I think it is greater than 0%.

I honestly believe that you have to be born into privilege to believe something like "You are the least important factor in your success". I cannot believe it after seeing what I have seen.

Moreover, when privileged people tell the world that success is all luck, I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect. You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". I tell them "Fight harder! You'll make it! Keep trying!". Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it. But if they fail, they'll fail with dignity and self-respect. That's worth something.

Are you male, white and born in America? Sounds pretty lucky to me.

But then again - you probably can't see past your own ego (fundamental attribution error FTW). Let's see you fight your way out of being an AIDS infected baby born somewhere in Sudan.

> I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life

Similar backgrounds. Different outcomes. Take the delta - you get luck.

> I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect

Ah yes - attributing success to oneself is soooo much healthier.

> You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen".

Straw man. Never said that. Only indicated that your success is dictated to you by both your environment and your DNA.

> Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it

s/some/most/g

> privileged people tell the world that success is all luck

You are privileged - but you obviously can't see that (how many people have access to safe water again?). It's to your own benefit that you attribute success to yourself.

>"Let's see you fight your way out of being an AIDS infected baby born somewhere in Sudan."

Oh I certainly agree with you that there are people born in terrible circumstances, much worse than anything I will ever experience! But I fear you are setting up something of a straw man by picking out the worst case scenario. The truth is that people are born into a range of circumstances some of which are easier to work with than others. But being dedicated to doing the best with what you have is important if you want to get anywhere in life.

I know that good choices and the willingness to tolerate a lot of pain can send you out of the rural south to a tech job in California given enough time. And I know that bad choices and shortsightedness mean you are living off government benefits in a skeezy trailer park, a parent before the age of 20, and never leaving your home state.

I do count my blessings. And I know there are some circumstances which I would not be able to overcome. But I can't believe that a person has no agency in his life.

You seem convinced of your position. I wonder what evidence convinced you of it?

(And I often find racial stereotypes to be numerically ignorant. The complete distribution is not described by the mean or the outliers.)

Funny. I think we might agree on our life philosophy in some ways.

See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5180718

I just want to make it clear - one should not attribute one's success to one's own hard work. Nor should one blame one's failures solely on oneself. Both make the fundamental attribution error.

> And I know that bad choices and shortsightedness mean you are living off government benefits in a skeezy trailer park, a parent before the age of 20, and never leaving your home state.

Being born in that area is a strong predictor of ending up in that skeezy trailer park. I don't particularly blame them from ending up there. No different to poor Africans really.

Your other comment said that you try to make sure you don't attribute any of your success to your own hard work and study. Um, what does that even mean? You think the actions and mindset of the individual have absolutely zero effect on the outcome? As an experiment, why don't you try completely eliminating that variable and just stop trying, to see if it has no effect on where you go. Not only that, but how do you account for two people who are born in roughly symmetrical situations who go on to have completely different outcomes? While I like the part of your philosophy that acknowledges grace and appreciation for what you've been given, I think it's a bit absurd to remove yourSELF from the equation of where you're going, unless you have some massive guilt-complex that follows you around biting you in your own ass and this somehow alleviates it.

> Um, what does that even mean?

I couldn't do that hard work and study without immense privilege afforded to me by my environment. That's the point.

> You think the actions and mindset of the individual have absolutely zero effect on the outcome

Your environment is the major determinant on your possible actions and mindset.

Okay, so you appreciate that your environment has played a role in where you are and where your going. That's valuable to acknowledge and - as an egoic and often delusional species -sometimes we lose track of that. But all your comments seem to reflect that you think the agent plays zero role in it's own outcome. Or, if you have refined it to a more plausible second point, what evidence can you provide me that the environment plays more of a role than the agent. If you want to start talking philosophy and determinism, then I'm happy to, but I really urge you to start making some really bad decisions to see how much effect your actions make. Seriously, stop wearing a seat belt, start yelling at every person you meet and being hostile to them, stop wearing clothes in public, stop working or taking any risks whatsoever, stop applying yourself to anything you love, go drink a handle of whiskey every night, completely stop exercising, play WOW for 18 hours a day, don't study philosophy, be close minded, tell yourself you hate yourself everyday. Just stop evaluating the effects of any decisions you make whatsoever. Seriously, lose all ownership, after all, the environment is the major determinant of what happens to you, so it literally doesn't matter if you decide to do these things. What've you got to lose?

> stop wearing a seat belt, start yelling at every person you meet and being hostile to them, stop wearing clothes in public, stop working or taking any risks whatsoever, stop applying yourself to anything you love, go drink a handle of whiskey every night, completely stop exercising, play WOW for 18 hours a day, don't study philosophy, be close minded, tell yourself you hate yourself everyday

My environment has disincentivized me from such behaviour - either by law or upbringing. Hence I don't partake in it. I'm sure if my environment was different - I would act differently. If I was brought up by a drug addict, there is a high likelihood I would also become one. If I was brought up poor - I'd likely stay poor (due to structural factors).

The point is the environment predetermined my values and actions.

So why not control the discussion for the role luck plays for white males born in the U.S. between 1950 and 2010? It's obvious that factors outside our control are major factors in what we can accomplish in our lives, but that doesn't mean that within a controlled group the question of luck vs agency shouldn't be examined.

You can't control for luck.

Oh, striving is certainly necessary to succeed at all. But empirically, things still seem to be zero sum. Out of a group of people with dreams and motivation, some will connect up with opportunities to express and manifest them, and some will not. There are gatekeepers everywhere, in every institution, at every level, in every sphere. I've experienced dire poverty and luxuriant affluence, in cycles, multiple times. Yet I've always been the same person. Always smart, motivated, and hard-working. Sometimes the right series of gatekeepers says "Yes, welcome aboard," in series, and it rains. Other times, they say no. If you've experienced a lot of 'yes' lately, it always seems like it was due to all that perseverance. And if you've had a run of 'no thanks,' it'll seem like your luck has turned.

I disagree that luck has anything to do with success. People get lucky all the time and do nothing with it.

How many people win the lottery only to go broke? When that happens nobody bats an eyelash, but if someone uses those lottery winnings to start a successful company, it was 1,000,000% the lotteries fault for this persons success, not their initiative.

No doubt some people are lucky and have an easier time than others, but opportunity is such a small part of the equation. People in the U.S will literally get dozens of opportunities a year to become successful, but they're not paying attention and never even notice them, and they will continue griping about how unfair their life is.

It is the tenacity someone has to build something from nothing, and their ability to do that over again if everything falls apart, that sets one apart from the unsuccessful.

While everyone else is obsessively pursuing escapism through television, gossip, or substance, a successful person is obsessively pursuing the steps they need to take to alter their own reality to something better.

The luck argument in my opinion is ignorant because the type of person who strives to be successful doesn't want anything handed to them, they understand that dependence is born out of things coming too easily, so they reject it.

The type of person who waits for luck to strike, is doomed to either disappointment or dependence. They will never feel that same confidence and security a success minded person feels, because even with wealth, their focus will be on not losing that wealth. Someone who built their own success is confident in their ability to start over.

Well, you're wrong.

Luck is a big factor in exceptional successes. As the article says: it's not sufficient. It's not necessary to be moderately successful. But no matter how tenacious and "success minded" you are, without a stroke of luck your success will be pretty limited.

When someone uses lottery winnings to start a successful company, do you really think they would have gotten "dozens of opportunities each year" to invest a large amount of money however they want?

It's of course a very attractive delusion to claim that luck has no part in success. To the successful person it increases their personal sense of achievement, and to the one hoping to be successful it makes big successes appear more achievable. Especially if you add the idea that it's not about talent/intelligence either but only about mindset.

But it's still a delusion.

I disagree.

Success is all about trial and error. If you want to call it luck when you run out of things that can go wrong, then call it luck. I consider luck to be an exception, not an inevitability.

The only role luck has in achieved success is avoiding the errors by doing things correctly the first time around, but that still isn't exactly luck, because not knowing what can go wrong leaves you vulnerable to future problems.

> When someone uses lottery winnings to start a successful company, do you really think they would have gotten "dozens of opportunities each year" to invest a large amount of money however they want?

My point was you don't often hear about lottery winners investing their money and turning it into a business system. You do hear about lottery winners blowing their windfall with nothing to show for it in the end though.

If good luck is the only reason that people born poor can become wealthy, then is bad luck the only reason that people born wealthy go broke?

Good article, reminds me of The Myth of the Garage essay by the Heath bros [1]. And the unforgettable high-school slogan "luck (or success) is where preparation meets opportunity." You don't always control the opportunities.

[1] http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/

edit: misquoted the unforgettable

You don't always control the opportunities. But you can sure show up where they serve them.

Except for when they show up at all-white country clubs.

That's true, but (and I may be misreading it here) I feel like the piece speaks to an even deeper element of chance: the chance that you even find your true passion to begin with. If you're in love with a discipline and know you want to excel in it, then you're lucky to have solidified a purpose in your life. Some people take years, decades, maybe their entire lives to discover what it is that truly makes them tick. I'm sure some never do.

Do know that a lot of people are just too afraid to even try. Society has put them down so much that they cannot fathom standing up for themselves. Its really sad. Many talented people waste away due to how we decide to run things. Still, survival of the fittest applies here too. If you cannot make your own luck then bad luck. Someone else will.

Being someone who has always just jumped in and tried whatever I found interesting, it really is amazing see how immobile people often feel. I've had discussions with several people who believe that they cannot try anything without the backing of an educational institution, of which they often do not have time/money available to explore that option, leaving them doing nothing at all.

I love that quote and the idea behind it. Hard to implement, but good to keep in mind.

Luck matters for people who are obsessed with Success. If you are working on things that you absolutely love, would you care about luck that much ?

If you already have favorable circumstances like having a healthy brain and living in a developed society you can count on hardwork to make you a millionaire. But No one owes you Billion Dollars no matter what you do in your life. Nature is not designed to optimize your work/luck balance.

Out of trillions of cells in a human body few cells gets lucky once in a while to massively grow and cause tumors. Its not a normal course for a cell to cause cancer and thats why its called an anomaly. Same goes for people in the society.

Success might be accidental. But I agree with the sentiment that if you keep trying (and are dedicated, smart, etc), you'll reach success. In that sense, it isn't accidental. But what is I think linked to luck is the magnitude of your success.

That first mil seems to be all work. Then all the millions thereafter seems to be all luck.

Or is it the other way around...

For me it was the first thousand. For some reason I was blocking myself from making more than that. But now, well, I am not blocked anymore. :)

I agree with most all of this. The author only gets in trouble towards the end (when he's making his point, unfortunately)

"...In my perfect world, this reflection would lead these people to use their power to make similar levels of luck more likely for a wider variety of people. Given the chance, I bet their skills can take them from there..."

The story he left out was the one that needs to be told more: the guy who kept failing and failing until one day he was a huge success. To hear Madigral tell it, the onus is on the successful to make similar levels of luck more likely for folks.

The problem is manyfold. One, aspects of success is rarely predetermined. You don't know where it's going to happen. So where would you assist? Two, because there are way more failures than successes, the goal here is to create people who will "happily fail" -- trying as hard as they can, learning some good lessons, then moving on. This ability is an internal attribute. You can't make somebody have it. Finally, he has the model all wrong. Very rarely in these stories does some outsider come in and decide to make life better for somebody just because of his good graces. Much more likely, hard-working and resilient founders run into people who are more than happy to use them for their own purposes -- which also helps the founders along.

Yes, absolutely, it's luck. But its a special kind of luck. It's not chance. This isn't winning the lottery. It's 99% what's going on inside the head of the person combined with playing a game with 1-in-20 odds. The minute you start externalizing all of that -- saying that an external agent can directly and purposefully "make" somebody lucky? The train has left the rails. Your model is all wrong.

The reason the multiple failure story needs to be told more is that no matter how you jigger the external setup, you're never sure you're headed in the right direction. So keeping trying, pivoting, and so forth are much more indicative of success than some kind of environmental issue. Successful people do it from anywhere. Might take them 40 years, but they don't stop. They just keep playing the game. That's as big of a success factor as luck. If the odds are 1-in-20, and it takes 2 years to fail? Looks like you've got 40 years of work. Most all of us can't handle that, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible, either. You can manage your luck.

We can't change the "variety of people" that are successful by external factors. You can't engineer market efficiency by fiat. If you could, you could just skip all that messy hard work and chance stuff and just hand out some nebulous thing called "opportunity" to folks. Doesn't work that way. Can't do outcome-based entrepreneurial configuration, as much as many really smart and really rich people would like to try.

The other problem is that a person's area of greatness is not something manufactured by sober committee decision-making. It's the confluence of personality and circumstance. They would not become great if they were stuck wringing their hands about what they owe the world and how they can raise everybody up. Don't get me wrong, a particular great man's calling may be precisely to raise up his fellow man, but "greatness" is not a fleeting attribute that one is magically blessed with and then must arbitrarily direct.

I think this misses the point of the article and these types of discussions in general. To me, the value of this perspective is that it takes the ego out of this self-directed narrative, and places it in the proper context as a local manifestation of a long running evolutionary process. To see people not as god-like conjurers but as products of whimsical evolutionary circumstance is, I think, the proper seed for developing a deep and universal compassion, the type of compassion that renders the answer to your question of "where to assist" quite obvious, and exposes the goal of creating people with this "willing to fail" attribute as hopelessly naive.

The ability to "fail happily" is less an intrinsic trait as it is having support structures in place that allow for an individual to take bold action without jeopardizing their ability to eat or provide for their family. In this way it is much easier for a kid from a rich family to take the kind of risks that in rare cases lead to great success than it is for a kid from a poor family to do the same. No one can deny that the successes lead to the creation of great social wealth, and so it is in our species' interest to remove the various pressures that keep people locked into safe but stagnant pathways, and allow everyone to take the kinds of chances that produce new mutations for evolution to select from.

Note that I don't think the state should be providing this safety net, this is more of an abstract observation. I have my own ideas on how I think it should be implemented, but I don't think it's particularly relevant to the point here. I'm not particularly convinced by arguments about incentives, although I realize that may be the main objection people have and I think that does have a place in the debate.

I'm really interested in how you can take agency out of evolution, since agency evolved as a survival trait. I don't think you have to focus on ego, but neither can you toss it out. That's what makes it such an interesting conversation. It's not all ego, and it's not all environment. It's the mix.

I understand the desire to reduce this to a simpler model where you can control all the levers. But quite frankly I can't see such a model being created. You have to ask yourself whether you want to analyze and manipulate the world you live in, or create another world where problems are solved in a much more direct and simple manner.

Sorry, not trying to troll or start a fight. I just found you comment diametrically opposite of mine and that was fascinating to me.

No, no, I'm all about the discussion. Shit, this is more to test my ideas than to assert any sort of truth.

Maybe another question will get us closer to the root of the issue:

Whose agency are we talking about, the individual's, or the genes'?

Yeah but that's the point. Nobody knows what the genes contribute to start with.

If you want to argue determinism, that we are all products of genes and external factors, and that by manipulating genes and external factors we can directly control the evolution of society, that we can remove ego from the equation, you have to be able to explain the causality of how all this determinism works. Correlation is not causality!

So sure, if we somehow had a God's Eye view of the world of man, his genes, social interactions, inbred habits and those attributes and everything else which evolves into a successful startup, then we could begin a discussion around which of those we could change that might reach our goal (A knowledge of the interaction of these elements would also be needed)

In this scenario we're all just Sims playing in somebody's game. BTW, this is a completely rational view, and one day we may arrive there (Or we may already be there for some greater being than us!)

But for all intents and purposes, especially for the goals of our discussion, we are not there yet.

Determinism has a seductive siren call. It's just not a very pragmatic stance, at least not where we are today.

It's quite simple to explain the causality. When you break everything down it eventually comes down to physics (ok so it's not that simple to explain, but it's conceptually simple).

However I vehemently deny that we can manipulate genes to control the evolution of society. At least in any positive direction, manipulating genes would certainly have some effect on our evolution, but I would argue that our limited knowledge would make this far more likely to be detrimental. This returns to my original point, removing ego from the equation. Evolution has proceeded over the last 4 billion years to create remarkable beings, all without our guidance. This blind progression is in fact the strength of the process, since shifting selective pressures are inherently unknowable, and any attempt to consciously control genes in any direction would lead to a reduction in biodiversity and overall fitness.

This then extends to memetic evolution. When mutations are made more rare (by channeling people into stagnant status quo sustaining pathways), and selected against too strongly (by punishing heterodox positions with starvation), memetic diversity is reduced and the risk of succumbing to new selection pressures rises. Any attempt to preferentially allocate resources is in this way self-sustaining (read incestual), and commits the same egotistical error as trying to manipulate genetics. Absent the knowledge (and the hope of ever attaining the knowledge) of what genes and memes will be long-term beneficial, the only reasonable course of action to my mind is the sort of universal support and equality of economic "opportunity" that I mention.

Disconnected you are. Labeling you do not know and pretending you know. Still, belief is lagging behind and dismissed, baffled where you are.

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