8 ms·

The Role of Luck in Life Success

93 points by hourislate 7y ago

netfl0 7y ago
This article starts out with such broad implied definitions of “luck” it is hard to figure out what they’re really saying.
- rb808 7y ago
  I hate things like "Far Greater Than We Realized" too. Who thought luck wasn't important and how long ago was that?
  - dang 7y ago
    Fortunately we can just lop that bit off the title above.
OnlineGladiator 7y ago
I've had a saying for a long time: it's better to be lucky than good. It doesn't matter how good you are if you're unlucky, and it doesn't matter how bad you are if you're lucky. There are lots of complicated statements around luck and success. For instance, how lucky was Zuckerberg to have been at Harvard for college when he was? He obviously saw an opportunity and turned it into Facebook, but do you think it's even conceivable he could have done that had he not happened to have been a student at Harvard? What if the Winklevoss twins had never approached him in the first place? What if he never met Sean Parker? There were a string of things that had to line up for the story to evolve the way it did, and none of them were in Zuckerberg's control. It's very easy to come up with examples of people just being unlucky. You could be born with a serious illness. Your child could die during birth. It's easy to think of situations that are just awful and there is nothing you could have done to prevent those awful things from occurring. There are lots of simple statements around luck and happiness. Nobody argues whether or not you're lucky to be born rich, healthy, tall, attractive, etcetera. But people argue over whether or not intelligence is driven largely by nature or by nurture. Experts even argue over whether or not happiness itself is largely determined by genetics. The general takeaway is luck is by definition what you cannot control so it's a fool's errand to try to do so. But success is what happens when luck stumbles across someone who was prepared to take advantage of it. Zuckerberg may have been lucky to have been at Harvard when he was, but he immediately saw the opportunity and turned it into Facebook - and (love him or hate him) he deserves credit for that.
- walkingolof 7y ago
  Most of the time you have to work hard to be lucky...
  - chx 7y ago
    Or if you are lucky you need to work hard to do something with it. Quite a few years ago I lived a few bus stops from the venue of the yearly PHP conference in Hungary but somehow I never went. Just didn't seem worthwhile or something. In 2004 May, a friend of mine called on a Sunday he is going to attend the roadshow of said conference in a shitty rural city in Hungary with his brother driving and whether I wanted to tag along. I shrugged and went. Still have no idea why. That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. Being present at that roadshow was luck. My meteoric rise from financially struggling Hungarian web developer to internationally acclaimed Drupal developer and architect of a Top 100 web property only five years later was, however, the result of me pouring practically every awake moment into Drupal (I believe it was a Google Summer Of Code mentor questionarie which asked how much extra time are we spending with our project and I still remember when I was like, I am not spending any extra time because that'd be impossible). The finances aligned. When I attended my first Drupal developer come together in 2005 February in Antwerp I needed to borrow money from my parents for the plane ticket and couch surf for I had no money. I bought a apartment right down on the beach in Vancouver in 2009... And yes, this seemed unreal and it still does, walking home every time fills me with a sense of "this is too good to be true".
    - nemo44x 7y ago
      > That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. As the old saying goes, "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness". You were prepared for this by evidence of you research into CMS's at the time. This enabled you to see the opportunity Drupal created. You clearly ran with this and your success followed. How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you did? They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you. If anything, you were lucky to have had the insight to see the potential an investment in Drupal could make and clearly it went beyond your wildest dreams in terms of financial and professional success. But even then I'd hesitate to call it all luck since you clearly saw that CMS's were becoming an important technology and Drupal in particular must have fused what you knew about CMS's and what could be possible.
Hermel 7y ago
The first example of luck they provide is how the country you are born in makes a huge difference. Of course it does! But with such a broad definition, even talent becomes a matter of luck, as talent requires the luck to be born with the right genetic preconditions and the luck of growing up in a environment that allows you to develop your talent. A better title would be: “An overly broad definition of luck leads to luck having a greater role in life.”
- balfirevic 7y ago
  What kind of sensible definition of luck wouldn't include the place where you were born?
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a developed country ever? I do believe that luck plays a huge role[0], but I get GP's point and I think it's fair. [0] I think what really drives it home for me is not knowing successful people, but knowing people for who it didn't work out, despite them seemingly making all the right moves.
    - balfirevic 7y ago
      > The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a developed country ever? Ok, so let's hear it?
      - Joe-Z 7y ago
        Well, I guess you could always define it as the events outside of the agent’s control that unfolded after she’s decided on and taken the first step towards her goal This way a casino player would still be lucky if she wins (but not in the ‚oh my gosh, how lucky are you that there exists a casino in the first place!‘-sense) and a successful person could still have her achievements honored even though there happened a lot of stuff before she entered the stage (like, ‚how „lucky“ was Newton that he didn‘t have to start from scratch, right?!‘)
friedman23 7y ago
As an avid poker player I think that the game reasonably approximates luck's role in life. There will be many situations where you will lose despite having done everything right and you will see other people win despite having done everything wrong. Both of these situations generally cause people to complain about injustice in the world, make illogical damaging decisions in desperation (go on tilt), or give up. Which of course causes them to lose any chance of success. The path to success is to make the correct decisions over and over again even if you fail the first 5 or 10 times. Of course if your definition of success is to be a billionaire you will likely never succeed but if it's to accumulate a reasonable amount of wealth or to achieve some measure of success in your field then it isn't as impossible as everyone is telling you.
- blablabla123 7y ago
  I like the comparison to poker which is a mixture of luck, skill and effort. The thing is also, if you win a lot of times in a row or at least are on top of the game, it is much more comfortable to play. You can continue with calculated risks. I think that's very much a position one wants to be in to feel successful and in control. Switching back from a disastrous round back to this mode is tough...
- foogazi 7y ago
  continuing with the poker analogy, in life you play multiple hands every day You’ll get your share of luck, but get to make decisions every day
friendlybus 7y ago
The article lists a bunch of things you can change personally and are therefore not "luck", like your last name, country of residence, display of middle initials and ease of pronouncing your name. It seems to conflate luck with randomness.
wppick 7y ago
I would think in certain societies luck (randomness) has much less of an impact on peoples lives than others. Like dropping a pin somewhere in Norway vs the US to represent where someone will be born. In the US there is may be a pretty large amount of luck associated with where that pin lands whereas in Norway it might be significantly less.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Maybe part of the problem is that luck has connotations that, for better or worse, change the way we perceive the argument. Would it make a difference if we replaced luck with chance or probability? Lucky sperm for example has some heavy overtones. Our language might be getting in the way.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carrozo 7y ago
I’ve had this old post from Marc Andreessen pinned in my mental browser for a long time now. There are four types of luck and you can influence three of them: Chance I is completely impersonal; you can't influence it. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors. https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html
- vntx 7y ago
  Boy, how lucky I am. The probability of me stumbling upon this informative gem would have been pretty low if I hadn’t been lurking around HN.
siegeofcondor 7y ago
Success in life has more to do with who you know, who your parents know and luck than anything, even hard work or intelligence. The more you live, the more you realize that much of life is beyond your control. When you were born, where you were born, even the opportunities available are all out of your control. Not to mention that there are only a few spots for success and even if everyone worked equally hard, most will fail while the few succeed.
awesome_dude 7y ago
A lot of comments discuss Zuck's luck, but a better example would be William Henry Gates III. Here was a kid born to a wealthy family, given a chance to learn about computers at an early age (before he was 11!). He leveraged that knowledge into a software business that was doing.. ok ish, whilst at Harvard. But his luck continued when IBM decided they wanted to outsource creation of an OS for their personal computer. He deflected IBM to another company, who, to this day, must be kicking themselves for messing up the opportunity, only to take on the task himself. His skills/company weren't great in that direction, having his mother on the IBM board saved his bacon many times over. Once he cashed that lottery ticket in, his more business minded friends saw to it that it was exponentially more valuable than anyone could have imagined. Whilst Bill was certainly skilled, there was more than enough luck involved for everyone.
WalterBright 7y ago
Jobs made 3 fortunes. One is luck, three is skill. Gates had 3 major turning points in the fortunes of Microsoft. It's hard to attribute all three to luck.
foogazi 7y ago
It’s not clear how talent is being measured. Is it IQ, resiliency, motivation ? And luck goes both ways, good luck or bad luck, we are all way way luckier just by being alive today

93 points by hourislate 7y ago

This article starts out with such broad implied definitions of “luck” it is hard to figure out what they’re really saying.

rb808 7y ago
I hate things like "Far Greater Than We Realized" too. Who thought luck wasn't important and how long ago was that?
- dang 7y ago
  Fortunately we can just lop that bit off the title above.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago

I've had a saying for a long time: it's better to be lucky than good. It doesn't matter how good you are if you're unlucky, and it doesn't matter how bad you are if you're lucky. There are lots of complicated statements around luck and success. For instance, how lucky was Zuckerberg to have been at Harvard for college when he was? He obviously saw an opportunity and turned it into Facebook, but do you think it's even conceivable he could have done that had he not happened to have been a student at Harvard? What if the Winklevoss twins had never approached him in the first place? What if he never met Sean Parker? There were a string of things that had to line up for the story to evolve the way it did, and none of them were in Zuckerberg's control. It's very easy to come up with examples of people just being unlucky. You could be born with a serious illness. Your child could die during birth. It's easy to think of situations that are just awful and there is nothing you could have done to prevent those awful things from occurring. There are lots of simple statements around luck and happiness. Nobody argues whether or not you're lucky to be born rich, healthy, tall, attractive, etcetera. But people argue over whether or not intelligence is driven largely by nature or by nurture. Experts even argue over whether or not happiness itself is largely determined by genetics. The general takeaway is luck is by definition what you cannot control so it's a fool's errand to try to do so. But success is what happens when luck stumbles across someone who was prepared to take advantage of it. Zuckerberg may have been lucky to have been at Harvard when he was, but he immediately saw the opportunity and turned it into Facebook - and (love him or hate him) he deserves credit for that.

walkingolof 7y ago
Most of the time you have to work hard to be lucky...
- chx 7y ago
  Or if you are lucky you need to work hard to do something with it. Quite a few years ago I lived a few bus stops from the venue of the yearly PHP conference in Hungary but somehow I never went. Just didn't seem worthwhile or something. In 2004 May, a friend of mine called on a Sunday he is going to attend the roadshow of said conference in a shitty rural city in Hungary with his brother driving and whether I wanted to tag along. I shrugged and went. Still have no idea why. That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. Being present at that roadshow was luck. My meteoric rise from financially struggling Hungarian web developer to internationally acclaimed Drupal developer and architect of a Top 100 web property only five years later was, however, the result of me pouring practically every awake moment into Drupal (I believe it was a Google Summer Of Code mentor questionarie which asked how much extra time are we spending with our project and I still remember when I was like, I am not spending any extra time because that'd be impossible). The finances aligned. When I attended my first Drupal developer come together in 2005 February in Antwerp I needed to borrow money from my parents for the plane ticket and couch surf for I had no money. I bought a apartment right down on the beach in Vancouver in 2009... And yes, this seemed unreal and it still does, walking home every time fills me with a sense of "this is too good to be true".
  - nemo44x 7y ago
    > That's when I first heard of Drupal, it wasn't visible at all back then despite I was heavily researching CMSes just then. As the old saying goes, "luck is when opportunity meets preparedness". You were prepared for this by evidence of you research into CMS's at the time. This enabled you to see the opportunity Drupal created. You clearly ran with this and your success followed. How many other people were there that didn't find the type of success you did? They were just as lucky to be at that conference at that time as you. If anything, you were lucky to have had the insight to see the potential an investment in Drupal could make and clearly it went beyond your wildest dreams in terms of financial and professional success. But even then I'd hesitate to call it all luck since you clearly saw that CMS's were becoming an important technology and Drupal in particular must have fused what you knew about CMS's and what could be possible.

Hermel 7y ago

The first example of luck they provide is how the country you are born in makes a huge difference. Of course it does! But with such a broad definition, even talent becomes a matter of luck, as talent requires the luck to be born with the right genetic preconditions and the luck of growing up in a environment that allows you to develop your talent. A better title would be: “An overly broad definition of luck leads to luck having a greater role in life.”

balfirevic 7y ago
What kind of sensible definition of luck wouldn't include the place where you were born?
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a developed country ever? I do believe that luck plays a huge role[0], but I get GP's point and I think it's fair. [0] I think what really drives it home for me is not knowing successful people, but knowing people for who it didn't work out, despite them seemingly making all the right moves.
  - balfirevic 7y ago
    > The kind that doesn't try to undermine every successful person born in a developed country ever? Ok, so let's hear it?
    - Joe-Z 7y ago
      Well, I guess you could always define it as the events outside of the agent’s control that unfolded after she’s decided on and taken the first step towards her goal This way a casino player would still be lucky if she wins (but not in the ‚oh my gosh, how lucky are you that there exists a casino in the first place!‘-sense) and a successful person could still have her achievements honored even though there happened a lot of stuff before she entered the stage (like, ‚how „lucky“ was Newton that he didn‘t have to start from scratch, right?!‘)

friedman23 7y ago

As an avid poker player I think that the game reasonably approximates luck's role in life. There will be many situations where you will lose despite having done everything right and you will see other people win despite having done everything wrong. Both of these situations generally cause people to complain about injustice in the world, make illogical damaging decisions in desperation (go on tilt), or give up. Which of course causes them to lose any chance of success. The path to success is to make the correct decisions over and over again even if you fail the first 5 or 10 times. Of course if your definition of success is to be a billionaire you will likely never succeed but if it's to accumulate a reasonable amount of wealth or to achieve some measure of success in your field then it isn't as impossible as everyone is telling you.

blablabla123 7y ago
I like the comparison to poker which is a mixture of luck, skill and effort. The thing is also, if you win a lot of times in a row or at least are on top of the game, it is much more comfortable to play. You can continue with calculated risks. I think that's very much a position one wants to be in to feel successful and in control. Switching back from a disastrous round back to this mode is tough...
foogazi 7y ago
continuing with the poker analogy, in life you play multiple hands every day You’ll get your share of luck, but get to make decisions every day

friendlybus 7y ago

The article lists a bunch of things you can change personally and are therefore not "luck", like your last name, country of residence, display of middle initials and ease of pronouncing your name. It seems to conflate luck with randomness.

wppick 7y ago

I would think in certain societies luck (randomness) has much less of an impact on peoples lives than others. Like dropping a pin somewhere in Norway vs the US to represent where someone will be born. In the US there is may be a pretty large amount of luck associated with where that pin lands whereas in Norway it might be significantly less.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

Maybe part of the problem is that luck has connotations that, for better or worse, change the way we perceive the argument. Would it make a difference if we replaced luck with chance or probability? Lucky sperm for example has some heavy overtones. Our language might be getting in the way.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

carrozo 7y ago

I’ve had this old post from Marc Andreessen pinned in my mental browser for a long time now. There are four types of luck and you can influence three of them: Chance I is completely impersonal; you can't influence it. Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore. Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors. https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html

vntx 7y ago
Boy, how lucky I am. The probability of me stumbling upon this informative gem would have been pretty low if I hadn’t been lurking around HN.

siegeofcondor 7y ago

Success in life has more to do with who you know, who your parents know and luck than anything, even hard work or intelligence. The more you live, the more you realize that much of life is beyond your control. When you were born, where you were born, even the opportunities available are all out of your control. Not to mention that there are only a few spots for success and even if everyone worked equally hard, most will fail while the few succeed.

awesome_dude 7y ago

A lot of comments discuss Zuck's luck, but a better example would be William Henry Gates III. Here was a kid born to a wealthy family, given a chance to learn about computers at an early age (before he was 11!). He leveraged that knowledge into a software business that was doing.. ok ish, whilst at Harvard. But his luck continued when IBM decided they wanted to outsource creation of an OS for their personal computer. He deflected IBM to another company, who, to this day, must be kicking themselves for messing up the opportunity, only to take on the task himself. His skills/company weren't great in that direction, having his mother on the IBM board saved his bacon many times over. Once he cashed that lottery ticket in, his more business minded friends saw to it that it was exponentially more valuable than anyone could have imagined. Whilst Bill was certainly skilled, there was more than enough luck involved for everyone.

WalterBright 7y ago

Jobs made 3 fortunes. One is luck, three is skill. Gates had 3 major turning points in the fortunes of Microsoft. It's hard to attribute all three to luck.

foogazi 7y ago

It’s not clear how talent is being measured. Is it IQ, resiliency, motivation ? And luck goes both ways, good luck or bad luck, we are all way way luckier just by being alive today