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The role of luck explains why your startup succeeds while that of another person who works just as hard and is just as smart fails. Obviously hard work is impor

The role of luck explains why your startup succeeds while that of another person who works just as hard and is just as smart fails. Obviously hard work is important, but most startups have a lot of hard-working and smart people behind them, and yet still fail. Those that do succeed are very hard to predict. If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. In general people prefer to underplay the affects of chance.

saganus 10y ago
> If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. Could it be also that maybe we are not yet aware of the myriad of other factors that also influence the outcome? i.e. it may seem like luck but it could be something we just aren't modelling properly, unless you define luck to be precisely the "bag of unknown variables". However more than once I've seen people define luck as "that ether around us that makes lucky people lucky", kind of like an external force and not something directly related to you, your surroundings and your history.
- selectron 10y ago
  Yes part of it is certainly hidden information, but for me luck is about how well the hidden information winds up helping you. The "ether around us that makes lucky people lucky" is a bit of a tautological definition of luck, really not sure what you mean by this. For me luck is when the variables you cannot control for work out in your favor. In physics we have what is known as the "look elsewhere effect", which is the phenomenon that if you look for new physics in many different places you are likely to find anomalies that look like new physics just due to chance. In the startup world this is roughly equivalent to saying that a startup's success was due to exceptional early founders or an exceptional idea only after that company has been successful. Here is an example - the article says to focus on building something people want. Well how do you know you have built something people want enough to pay for before they buy it? You can't really know, which is why VCs fund a lot of companies for cheap and try to see who is lucky enough to actually be building something people want. The conclusion of the article says that if you follow these steps you will be the master of your own fate, but this conclusion is disingenuous. It is based on looking backwards rather than forwards - all companies that succeed have made something people want and quickly increased their revenue, so all you have to do to succeed is make something people want and grow! Good luck.
  - saganus 10y ago
    Yes, it was tautological on purpose. Maybe I failed to communicate what I wanted, but basically I was trying to say that I've seen most people equate luck to something akin to a deity's intervention, i.e. luck is something that an external force thrusts upon you because destiny or whatever. You say that "luck is when the variables that you cannot control for work out in your favor", and I kind of agree with that, except that I have doubts if they are really variables you can't control that are part of this "good luck" term. e.g. Let's say I do great in my career because of "good luck". What amount of that luck is actually because I grew up in a family that gave me support, self-esteem, social skills, study skill, etc, even though many of those variable can't be controlled by you? My point is (not really disagreeing much with you) that luck can be actually just a way of describing all those variables that we don't know even exist or that we don't know how to model/explain, even though they are actually stuff that CAN be influenced by you or your family, friends, etc. Kind of how we describe dark matter or dark energy, where it's actually just a placeholder term for saying "we don't really know". So again, I do agree with you in that you could describe good luck as the set of those factors that helped you out and I guess also bad luck as those that work against you, and in that sense I also think that it's not really paiting the full picture, but unless you try to model these hidden variables, I guess it's as best a prediction as you can make to say that you need to avoid those 4 mistakes + "good luck". You actually got me thinking a lot on this...it's an interesting topic for me I guess.

saganus 10y ago

> If success is unpredictable, that usually means that luck plays a large role. Could it be also that maybe we are not yet aware of the myriad of other factors that also influence the outcome? i.e. it may seem like luck but it could be something we just aren't modelling properly, unless you define luck to be precisely the "bag of unknown variables". However more than once I've seen people define luck as "that ether around us that makes lucky people lucky", kind of like an external force and not something directly related to you, your surroundings and your history.

selectron 10y ago
Yes part of it is certainly hidden information, but for me luck is about how well the hidden information winds up helping you. The "ether around us that makes lucky people lucky" is a bit of a tautological definition of luck, really not sure what you mean by this. For me luck is when the variables you cannot control for work out in your favor. In physics we have what is known as the "look elsewhere effect", which is the phenomenon that if you look for new physics in many different places you are likely to find anomalies that look like new physics just due to chance. In the startup world this is roughly equivalent to saying that a startup's success was due to exceptional early founders or an exceptional idea only after that company has been successful. Here is an example - the article says to focus on building something people want. Well how do you know you have built something people want enough to pay for before they buy it? You can't really know, which is why VCs fund a lot of companies for cheap and try to see who is lucky enough to actually be building something people want. The conclusion of the article says that if you follow these steps you will be the master of your own fate, but this conclusion is disingenuous. It is based on looking backwards rather than forwards - all companies that succeed have made something people want and quickly increased their revenue, so all you have to do to succeed is make something people want and grow! Good luck.
- saganus 10y ago
  Yes, it was tautological on purpose. Maybe I failed to communicate what I wanted, but basically I was trying to say that I've seen most people equate luck to something akin to a deity's intervention, i.e. luck is something that an external force thrusts upon you because destiny or whatever. You say that "luck is when the variables that you cannot control for work out in your favor", and I kind of agree with that, except that I have doubts if they are really variables you can't control that are part of this "good luck" term. e.g. Let's say I do great in my career because of "good luck". What amount of that luck is actually because I grew up in a family that gave me support, self-esteem, social skills, study skill, etc, even though many of those variable can't be controlled by you? My point is (not really disagreeing much with you) that luck can be actually just a way of describing all those variables that we don't know even exist or that we don't know how to model/explain, even though they are actually stuff that CAN be influenced by you or your family, friends, etc. Kind of how we describe dark matter or dark energy, where it's actually just a placeholder term for saying "we don't really know". So again, I do agree with you in that you could describe good luck as the set of those factors that helped you out and I guess also bad luck as those that work against you, and in that sense I also think that it's not really paiting the full picture, but unless you try to model these hidden variables, I guess it's as best a prediction as you can make to say that you need to avoid those 4 mistakes + "good luck". You actually got me thinking a lot on this...it's an interesting topic for me I guess.