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The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate luck and what I will call lot. "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. You can manage

The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate luck and what I will call lot. "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. You can manage luck. Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries (e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck. Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you were raised, where you grew up, what kind of education you got -- everything you can't control that does have a significant impact on your life's outcomes. You can work to improve your lot, or minimize its impact on your life, but it's very difficult. Of course there's some correlation: those with a good lot often learn early how to manage luck, and those who manage luck well can negate a poor lot. Hence I begrudge no-one with seemingly good "luck": often (possibly more than not), their fortune is simply a byproduct of how they managed their luck. Good for them! But those born into a good lot? They're the true "lucky" ones.

Swizec 10y ago
I would add a third category: fortune. Lot is what you were born with. Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck. Fortune is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between $2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain. With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so. Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—’lucky.’ It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me."
- kajecounterhack 10y ago
  nit: seems like OP's definition of luck is roughly your definition of fortune. s/fortune/luck/rg in your post and I think you say the same thing. Creating a new bucket to qualify things that happen regardless of skill seems redundant with the definition of lot. "Lot" in the context of OP's post happens despite skill.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    I think there's a difference between lot and luck though. Lot is what you have before, luck is what you get during. To crib from Warren Buffet [1], imagine a coin flipping contest. Everyone bets $1 and calls the flip of a coin. Miss and you're out. Betting pool is distributed among everyone else. 20 rounds in, there are 215 people with a few hundred thousand dollars made from a $1 investment and some time. It's pure luck. They weren't even the one flipping the coin so couldn't have influenced the 50:50 chance even if they tried. That's luck. Fortune is when you both bet and flip the coin and find a technique to influence the flip to be 40:60 in your favor and it works out. Lot is when your dad gives you $100k to start a business. [1] http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2010/03/19/warren-buffetts-best-advice-ever.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2010/03/19/warren-buffet...
- stillsut 10y ago
  I'd separate hard work into two components: A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living in the unheated apartment. One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other people would pay for that experience. I think this separation opens up a few interesting ways of viewing those who are "too lazy" to do the hard work. First, different people flow in different tasks and so even if you gave Peter Dinklage a chance to work for openAI on any project he wanted, he might find it tiring and burn out. This is obvious, but by induction, there's this whole class of school-type activities that many people seem to mentally resist. Second, there seem to be different expectations on how much of B-type work one has to do in order to get the A-type work they crave. I think people perceived as lazy are those who doubt that almost any amount B-work they contribute will earn them their goal, only more the same. This is excellent when it discourages the average thirteen year old from pursuing pro sports as a career, but I think it also might be the largest reduction to productivity in our economy we have today, as discouraged people tend to lower output and cause problems for their company. And that's only the economic side, the social side of hopelessness and lack of meaning is way worse!
nerfhammer 10y ago
Richard Wiseman wrote a book on the subject of changing your luck: http://amzn.to/2jDN04M http://amzn.to/2jDN04M Shorter overview: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Bombthecat 10y ago
There is an old saying in FPS games: when luck becomes skill. Basically, you move the luck in your favour. Using the situation at hand for you.
- user5994461 10y ago
  I usually say for FPS: when you've got a lot of luck, that's called skill.
  - groby_b 10y ago
    And when anybody else has got a lot of luck, that's called an aimbot ;)
    - brodsky 10y ago
      and when you lack luck, it's called lag.
rrrx3 10y ago
This definition of "luck" sounds more like "risk mitigation" to me. Luck has a clear and easily understood definition.
- wyager 10y ago
  It's not just risk mitigation; it's expectimax optimization, which sometimes involves absorbing additional risk rather than just mitigating or minimizing it.
  - mapt 10y ago
    When we examine the path others took to achieve extraordinary success, this isn't even what we're doing. Instead, we're often looking at companies and people that took outrageous risks that will nearly always fail, and luckily ended up in just the right academic path, met just the right collaborator, entered just the right industry, had nobody else bother to compete with them, had an opponent make a fatal mistake, were noticed by just the right person, avoided the ubiquitous pitfall, et cetera. Luck has an enormous influence on what actually ends up on top. You can do deliberate optimization, and many of these people/orgs did some, but post-hoc reasoning that everything Amazon or Einstein were doing on their path to greatness must indicate radically greater decisionmaking powers than all others is extremely incorrect, and worse (because we think in narratives) extremely misleading/convincing. Many times, what got people to the top are high-risk, high-reward options. Buying lottery tickets (or the equivalent).
- kornish 10y ago
  Or: pursuing high upside, low-risk situations.
rhizome 10y ago
You seem to be circling around the crux of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).
greggman 10y ago
I've seen lots of examples of luck. This is not to suggest that tenacious people wouldn't succeed in some way or another but only that their current positions would be different. Some good examples: Ed Catmull in his own book mentioned all the luck he had becoming Pixar. Pixar was a computer hardware division at ILM. ILM wanted to get rid if them. They almost got sold to a computer company (lucky they didnt). They got bought by Steve Jobs who bought them to make computers. He spent $70 million dollars on them for them to make computers which they failed at. They then pivoted to animation. It's pretty lucky to find some person willing to blow $70 million on you and you don't have to earn a dime. Bill Gates is a smart guy but being president of Microsoft that makes the OS for the majority of PCs seems like lots of luck. Luck that he was in the right place at the right time to sell MS-DOS. Lucky that none of his competitors shipped something more popular. From that piece of luck the rest follows. Without that luck he could just have easily been like the president of Lotus or the president of Borland. IIRC Howard Lincoln, the first President of Nintendo of America got the job because he met the president of Nintendo at a layover in Chicago O'Hare Airport. The president of Nintendo said effectively, "Hey, I need someone to head up my USA division, how about you?" Without that luck Howard Lincoln would probably have just been a successful lawyer we'd never heard of. In my own life I know a guy that was just a game designer. The founders of the company he was working for sold out and he was made president. He's done very well but jees that's some serious luck. There was no struggle it was just handed to him. The head of the Chamber of Commerce in HK had the 3 guys above him leave. He was like 28 and inherited the job. Google, tried to sell to Yahoo. Where would they be if that had happened? Where would Facebook be if Friendster hadn't failed? I'm not in any way suggesting you shouldn't work hard to increase your chances of success. But there is also tons of luck in most big success.
- brutos 10y ago
  Bill Gates is a good example for OP's lot and luck point: "In 1980, [Mary Maxwell Gates] discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer." [1] Just an anecdote, but I like OP's point with lot and luck. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
wc23 10y ago
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. -Seneca
kriro 10y ago
A slight nitpick but I think the luck you manage in boardgames is risk and there's also the category of uncertainty which you can't manage (because you don't know the probability distribution or the fact that something is possible/could happen at all). See "Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit" by Frank Knight for a much better explanation of risk vs. uncertainty than what I can muster. I think it's noteworthy that entrepreneurship theory from economics tends to be build around the idea that it is indeed handling uncertainty (and not risk) that yields entrepreneurial profits.

Swizec 10y ago

I would add a third category: fortune. Lot is what you were born with. Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck. Fortune is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between $2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain. With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so. Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—’lucky.’ It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me."

kajecounterhack 10y ago
nit: seems like OP's definition of luck is roughly your definition of fortune. s/fortune/luck/rg in your post and I think you say the same thing. Creating a new bucket to qualify things that happen regardless of skill seems redundant with the definition of lot. "Lot" in the context of OP's post happens despite skill.
- Swizec 10y ago
  I think there's a difference between lot and luck though. Lot is what you have before, luck is what you get during. To crib from Warren Buffet [1], imagine a coin flipping contest. Everyone bets $1 and calls the flip of a coin. Miss and you're out. Betting pool is distributed among everyone else. 20 rounds in, there are 215 people with a few hundred thousand dollars made from a $1 investment and some time. It's pure luck. They weren't even the one flipping the coin so couldn't have influenced the 50:50 chance even if they tried. That's luck. Fortune is when you both bet and flip the coin and find a technique to influence the flip to be 40:60 in your favor and it works out. Lot is when your dad gives you $100k to start a business. [1] http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2010/03/19/warren-buffetts-best-advice-ever.aspx http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2010/03/19/warren-buffet...
stillsut 10y ago
I'd separate hard work into two components: A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living in the unheated apartment. One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other people would pay for that experience. I think this separation opens up a few interesting ways of viewing those who are "too lazy" to do the hard work. First, different people flow in different tasks and so even if you gave Peter Dinklage a chance to work for openAI on any project he wanted, he might find it tiring and burn out. This is obvious, but by induction, there's this whole class of school-type activities that many people seem to mentally resist. Second, there seem to be different expectations on how much of B-type work one has to do in order to get the A-type work they crave. I think people perceived as lazy are those who doubt that almost any amount B-work they contribute will earn them their goal, only more the same. This is excellent when it discourages the average thirteen year old from pursuing pro sports as a career, but I think it also might be the largest reduction to productivity in our economy we have today, as discouraged people tend to lower output and cause problems for their company. And that's only the economic side, the social side of hopelessness and lack of meaning is way worse!

nerfhammer 10y ago

Richard Wiseman wrote a book on the subject of changing your luck: http://amzn.to/2jDN04M http://amzn.to/2jDN04M Shorter overview: http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf

Bombthecat 10y ago

There is an old saying in FPS games: when luck becomes skill. Basically, you move the luck in your favour. Using the situation at hand for you.

user5994461 10y ago
I usually say for FPS: when you've got a lot of luck, that's called skill.
- groby_b 10y ago
  And when anybody else has got a lot of luck, that's called an aimbot ;)
  - brodsky 10y ago
    and when you lack luck, it's called lag.

rrrx3 10y ago

This definition of "luck" sounds more like "risk mitigation" to me. Luck has a clear and easily understood definition.

wyager 10y ago
It's not just risk mitigation; it's expectimax optimization, which sometimes involves absorbing additional risk rather than just mitigating or minimizing it.
- mapt 10y ago
  When we examine the path others took to achieve extraordinary success, this isn't even what we're doing. Instead, we're often looking at companies and people that took outrageous risks that will nearly always fail, and luckily ended up in just the right academic path, met just the right collaborator, entered just the right industry, had nobody else bother to compete with them, had an opponent make a fatal mistake, were noticed by just the right person, avoided the ubiquitous pitfall, et cetera. Luck has an enormous influence on what actually ends up on top. You can do deliberate optimization, and many of these people/orgs did some, but post-hoc reasoning that everything Amazon or Einstein were doing on their path to greatness must indicate radically greater decisionmaking powers than all others is extremely incorrect, and worse (because we think in narratives) extremely misleading/convincing. Many times, what got people to the top are high-risk, high-reward options. Buying lottery tickets (or the equivalent).
kornish 10y ago
Or: pursuing high upside, low-risk situations.

rhizome 10y ago

You seem to be circling around the crux of the fundamental attribution error (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error).

greggman 10y ago

I've seen lots of examples of luck. This is not to suggest that tenacious people wouldn't succeed in some way or another but only that their current positions would be different. Some good examples: Ed Catmull in his own book mentioned all the luck he had becoming Pixar. Pixar was a computer hardware division at ILM. ILM wanted to get rid if them. They almost got sold to a computer company (lucky they didnt). They got bought by Steve Jobs who bought them to make computers. He spent $70 million dollars on them for them to make computers which they failed at. They then pivoted to animation. It's pretty lucky to find some person willing to blow $70 million on you and you don't have to earn a dime. Bill Gates is a smart guy but being president of Microsoft that makes the OS for the majority of PCs seems like lots of luck. Luck that he was in the right place at the right time to sell MS-DOS. Lucky that none of his competitors shipped something more popular. From that piece of luck the rest follows. Without that luck he could just have easily been like the president of Lotus or the president of Borland. IIRC Howard Lincoln, the first President of Nintendo of America got the job because he met the president of Nintendo at a layover in Chicago O'Hare Airport. The president of Nintendo said effectively, "Hey, I need someone to head up my USA division, how about you?" Without that luck Howard Lincoln would probably have just been a successful lawyer we'd never heard of. In my own life I know a guy that was just a game designer. The founders of the company he was working for sold out and he was made president. He's done very well but jees that's some serious luck. There was no struggle it was just handed to him. The head of the Chamber of Commerce in HK had the 3 guys above him leave. He was like 28 and inherited the job. Google, tried to sell to Yahoo. Where would they be if that had happened? Where would Facebook be if Friendster hadn't failed? I'm not in any way suggesting you shouldn't work hard to increase your chances of success. But there is also tons of luck in most big success.

brutos 10y ago
Bill Gates is a good example for OP's lot and luck point: "In 1980, [Mary Maxwell Gates] discussed her son's company with John Opel, a fellow committee member and the chairman of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other IBM executives. A few weeks later, IBM took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer." [1] Just an anecdote, but I like OP's point with lot and luck. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

wc23 10y ago

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. -Seneca

kriro 10y ago

A slight nitpick but I think the luck you manage in boardgames is risk and there's also the category of uncertainty which you can't manage (because you don't know the probability distribution or the fact that something is possible/could happen at all). See "Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit" by Frank Knight for a much better explanation of risk vs. uncertainty than what I can muster. I think it's noteworthy that entrepreneurship theory from economics tends to be build around the idea that it is indeed handling uncertainty (and not risk) that yields entrepreneurial profits.