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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

"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.

> 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.

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