4 ms·

There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. I read this and go “yep, lu

by sulam 9y ago

There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. I read this and go “yep, luck is a huge factor in whether or not your hard work will pay off”. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work hard — you’re essentially playing the lottery otherwise. You also have to decide how much of an asshole you’re willing to be (hate to say it, but if you’re willing to behave without morals, your chances of making money go up in the short term). I’m personally not wired to behave like an asshole, so it’s been hard work and a few lucky breaks that could be parlayed into more opportunities that in turn paid off, sometimes handsomely. Looking back over 25 years, I can point at exactly where and how I got lucky many times. I needed to be in position to take advantage of those lucky breaks, and I needed to make the most of them (I didn’t always succeed at that!), but some essentially stochastic event has almost always been straight-line connected to an eventual outcome.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
> There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. There's a paragraph in there dedicated to just that; in that case, the HR person that handled her application was fired / quit and the whole application apparently went down the shitter.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  “Aish, after much discussion, we realised we really want you in the team. But the HR who was handling your papers had to quit and therefore we will no longer be pursuing your application. I am very sorry that we have taken so long to respond”. This is the freaking CEO talking. Here's my translation: "Aish, we want you, but we can't have you because someone quit, and we're too incompetent to follow up."
  - pjc50 9y ago
    I suspect even worse: the HR person kept asking why this woman wasn't being hired and preference to was being given to a German male candidate, and was therefore removed or driven out. (although it can't be trivial to fire people in Germany?)
  - gebeeson 9y ago
    Yep. Sounds like that company did her a huge favor in hind sight for not hiring her. If that is how HR is handled, cannot imagine the rest of that operation being much better.
gcr 9y ago
Sure. Luck plays a big part in this. But we also have to acknowledge that someone who carries less privilege than you do is going to have both less of those opportunities to get lucky, and less luck when those opportunities do arrive. After all, luck favors the privileged.
- sulam 9y ago
  True in general. In my case I have the privilege of being white, male, and being born in the US. Pretty good stuff, but also: homeless, single mom without a high school education, living in crappy parts of the country for that kind of thing (Texas). There are (as the British would say) knock-on effects from that -- it took me a long time to learn effective spending habits. When you're poor, you spend money when you have it, because it will be going away somehow regardless of what you do. Also bad teeth, which, you know, I shouldn't be sensitive about, but I sometimes am. :) Anyway, you're right, the privileges we're born into affect a lot of potential success. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm trying to give my children all the advantages I didn't have, and genetically they're picking up the ones I did. They'd better damn well solve hunger or figure out world peace! :)
- blts 9y ago
  luck favors prepared.
thisisit 9y ago
> or have really bad grades This has been my pet peeve. Couple of years ago, I interviewed for a job. I had completed over 6 years of IT by that time. The company for some reason was interested in knowing my grades. Because my college gave out CGPA, it was easy to quantify the same. Now they wanted to talk about my performance in high school or my SAT scores. Now while I got the job. I was peeved about having to answer about my grades obtained 6 years later. The interviewing manager's had a theory - everyone needed to show an "intelligent" spark sometime in their life. He wasn't happy with me because I had been "average" performer all through my studies.
munificent 9y ago
I think the lottery analogy is a good one. I look at success as winning a lottery. Hard work doesn't guarantee a win, but it does buy more tickets. Likewise, all of the various privileges you may be born into (right nationality, race, gender, etc.) are basically a batch of tickets handed to you for free.
- circlefavshape 9y ago
  You can argue about the total number of tickets, and about the amount of extra tickets work/race/gender confers upon you in different contexts, but in essence this is the most realistic way to model 'success' and how it happens. The model works for health issues too - eating badly, smoking, being sedentary, being male ... all of these give you extra tickets in the death lottery (I first came across the lottery/tickets analogy in mixerman's posts on prosoundweb years ago, always assumed he had coined it but maybe not)
  - munificent 9y ago
    What's neat about the analogy is that it easily models one of the most fundamental tensions in human society: how much privilege should we be able to pass on to our children? In a perfectly fair world, we would all be born with the same number of lottery tickets, the same equal opportunity. But one of the primary goals of being successful is to be able to ensure better opportunities for our children, in essence giving them lottery tickets.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    I believe there are studies that show people overestimate how much control they have over getting cancer. It's the old "Just World Fallacy" thing, where the thought of randomly getting cancer no matter how "good" you are, while objectively accurate, is hard to cope with, so blaming the people with cancer for their predicament serves as a way to ward off the bad luck and feel in control of your life.
    - lazerpants 9y ago
      Actually, with cancer, you do have a lot of control over whether or not you get it based on lifestyle. Up to 90% of cancers are preventable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ Edit: 90% sounded way too high, so I dug up a more recent article on this, which claims it is 50%. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-lifestyle-could-prevent-half-of-all-cancer-deaths/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-l...

by sulam 9y ago

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

> There are going to be some people who read this and assume she must have interviewed poorly, or have really bad grades or something. There's a paragraph in there dedicated to just that; in that case, the HR person that handled her application was fired / quit and the whole application apparently went down the shitter.

loup-vaillant 9y ago
“Aish, after much discussion, we realised we really want you in the team. But the HR who was handling your papers had to quit and therefore we will no longer be pursuing your application. I am very sorry that we have taken so long to respond”. This is the freaking CEO talking. Here's my translation: "Aish, we want you, but we can't have you because someone quit, and we're too incompetent to follow up."
- pjc50 9y ago
  I suspect even worse: the HR person kept asking why this woman wasn't being hired and preference to was being given to a German male candidate, and was therefore removed or driven out. (although it can't be trivial to fire people in Germany?)
- gebeeson 9y ago
  Yep. Sounds like that company did her a huge favor in hind sight for not hiring her. If that is how HR is handled, cannot imagine the rest of that operation being much better.

gcr 9y ago

Sure. Luck plays a big part in this. But we also have to acknowledge that someone who carries less privilege than you do is going to have both less of those opportunities to get lucky, and less luck when those opportunities do arrive. After all, luck favors the privileged.

sulam 9y ago
True in general. In my case I have the privilege of being white, male, and being born in the US. Pretty good stuff, but also: homeless, single mom without a high school education, living in crappy parts of the country for that kind of thing (Texas). There are (as the British would say) knock-on effects from that -- it took me a long time to learn effective spending habits. When you're poor, you spend money when you have it, because it will be going away somehow regardless of what you do. Also bad teeth, which, you know, I shouldn't be sensitive about, but I sometimes am. :) Anyway, you're right, the privileges we're born into affect a lot of potential success. At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I'm trying to give my children all the advantages I didn't have, and genetically they're picking up the ones I did. They'd better damn well solve hunger or figure out world peace! :)
blts 9y ago
luck favors prepared.

thisisit 9y ago

> or have really bad grades This has been my pet peeve. Couple of years ago, I interviewed for a job. I had completed over 6 years of IT by that time. The company for some reason was interested in knowing my grades. Because my college gave out CGPA, it was easy to quantify the same. Now they wanted to talk about my performance in high school or my SAT scores. Now while I got the job. I was peeved about having to answer about my grades obtained 6 years later. The interviewing manager's had a theory - everyone needed to show an "intelligent" spark sometime in their life. He wasn't happy with me because I had been "average" performer all through my studies.

munificent 9y ago

I think the lottery analogy is a good one. I look at success as winning a lottery. Hard work doesn't guarantee a win, but it does buy more tickets. Likewise, all of the various privileges you may be born into (right nationality, race, gender, etc.) are basically a batch of tickets handed to you for free.

circlefavshape 9y ago
You can argue about the total number of tickets, and about the amount of extra tickets work/race/gender confers upon you in different contexts, but in essence this is the most realistic way to model 'success' and how it happens. The model works for health issues too - eating badly, smoking, being sedentary, being male ... all of these give you extra tickets in the death lottery (I first came across the lottery/tickets analogy in mixerman's posts on prosoundweb years ago, always assumed he had coined it but maybe not)
- munificent 9y ago
  What's neat about the analogy is that it easily models one of the most fundamental tensions in human society: how much privilege should we be able to pass on to our children? In a perfectly fair world, we would all be born with the same number of lottery tickets, the same equal opportunity. But one of the primary goals of being successful is to be able to ensure better opportunities for our children, in essence giving them lottery tickets.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I believe there are studies that show people overestimate how much control they have over getting cancer. It's the old "Just World Fallacy" thing, where the thought of randomly getting cancer no matter how "good" you are, while objectively accurate, is hard to cope with, so blaming the people with cancer for their predicament serves as a way to ward off the bad luck and feel in control of your life.
  - lazerpants 9y ago
    Actually, with cancer, you do have a lot of control over whether or not you get it based on lifestyle. Up to 90% of cancers are preventable. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2515569/ Edit: 90% sounded way too high, so I dug up a more recent article on this, which claims it is 50%. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-lifestyle-could-prevent-half-of-all-cancer-deaths/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/healthy-l...