5 ms·

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 a

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.
    - chx 7y ago
      > 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. Ha that's right. What I must have seen but failed to put into words is https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less: > All content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less. — Boris Mann at DrupalCON Amsterdam, August 2005. Typo3, Tikiwiki, Phpnuke (heaven forbid), XOOPS, even Mambo/Joomla, these were the systems of the day. Drupal ... sucked less and gained a lot more marketshare.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  I think that only applies to the category of success. But some people are just born rich. Some people are just born healthy, attractive, and even happy! Research suggests half of life satisfaction is determined by your genes. https://positivepsychology.com/is-happiness-genetic/ https://positivepsychology.com/is-happiness-genetic/ What's luckier than winning the genetic lottery?
- james_s_tayler 7y ago
  That's working out real well for Africa.
  - foogazi 7y ago
    you don’t think people are successful in Africa?
    - james_s_tayler 7y ago
      In aggregate? No. By virtue of not being born there I'm better off than the vast majority. Sure, I work hard at what I do. I'm also lucky a series of lucky and unlucky events transpired the way they did in order for there to exist an opportunity for me to work hard at something and do well. Luck is 90% of it for pretty much everyone.
      - foogazi 7y ago
        better off !== success
        james_s_tayler 7y ago
        Keep telling yourself that.
- Neil44 7y ago
  Plenty of people work like slaves their whole lives and don’t do all that well.
friendlybus 7y ago
The "luck" of Zuckerberg seems to imply it was a random event he was at Harvard and that he didn't intend to be there. That story is about the meaning of being at a place like Harvard, you have the tools and people around you to see and take advantage of opportunities before others. The conflict behind the story is whether your suffering is the result of something random or meaningful. Someone who does the best they can at a lesser university and gets lesser results is not a result of randomness, but the meaning (or properties, qualities) of being at a lesser university and the choices made beforehand. Attributing randomness to big successes undermines the hard work that a lot of people go through to get one step up the chain.
- OnlineGladiator 7y ago
  > Attributing randomness to big successes undermines the hard work that a lot of people go through to get one step up the chain. This is my entire argument. There's a much easier way to phrase it though: life's not fair.
  - Joe-Z 7y ago
    To me "life's not fair" reads as a contradiction to the cited statement. As I understand it GP's argument was that, yes it may have been luck to meet the right people at the right time, but that a lot of conscious decision and discipline went into being in the right position at the right time beforehand. Reading it that way, life is fair, since it rewarded the work previously put into building up a life's success. Another way to say it would be: If facebook hadn't made Zuckerberg a billionaire, something else would have made him at least a huge success (the stellar kinds of successes that people like Zuckerberg experience are probably still insanely unlikely even in the world of billionaires)
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    I don't mean to guarantee success in the face of randomness, but rather to understand and highlight the meaning of making a good decision at the right time, regardless of the fortune or misfortune of luck.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
isoos 7y ago
I think you can somewhat control your potential for luck, which IIRC Dilbert-creator Scott Adams called: your luck surface. The more you expose yourself to get lucky, the better your chances will be. Of course it doesn't work much with gambling, so I guess there is a cost function that needs to be considered too.
- awesome_dude 7y ago
  The cost function is the gaining of skills to make you good. Whilst upskilling, you're not out catching your lucky chance, you're busy reading/studying/practising.
paulpauper 7y ago
being good beats luck. being good allows one to to repeat successes whereas luck is often a one-time thing people who are the most successful are better than 99.9% of the people in the same field or area. They know the subtleties and intricacies of mastery that elude the majority of people. Zuck had been doing coding and other projects for years before creating Facebook. He didn't just overnight come up with this idea and learn all the skills needed to create it. This was a decade in the making for him.
- Jarwain 7y ago
  I guess the idea is that success is the combination of luck and skill. No amount of luck matters if they don't have the skill. Someone can be incredibly skilled, and not have the same impact if they don't get lucky
- ericd 7y ago
  Put another way, they’re related - being good dramatically increases your luck surface area.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    I like to put it as being becalmed in a lake with the sail up. When the wind comes, you pick it up and ride ahead with it. With the sale stowed, you miss the opportunity.
    - ericd 7y ago
      Hm I like that.
fredophile 7y ago
I agree that if I had to choose I'd rather be lucky than good. However, I can't affect my luck. I can do things that impact how good I am so that I don't need as much luck to be successful. I can also affect how many times I try. Repeated attempts should yield success eventually, possibly not in one lifetime, even if I'm unlucky.
- sfttty 7y ago
  IMHO, luck needs to be earned. There must be a reason for luck. Some may argue that some people are born smart and rich and they never did anything to deserve that. Well, even at the very beginning, when there were just a bunch of DNAs mixing up together, the entire process followed the very predictable laws of physics. It wasn't luck or coincidence. It's our interpretation of this physical process invents the identity if that child and attributes it with the undeserved luck, while in reality it's just a predictable physical process that couldn't have a different outcome.
  - tluyben2 7y ago
    We have no way of predicting that physical process (not by a very large margin) so reasoning about it that way is quite useless. The inability to predict (perhaps) deterministic physical processes is randomness and (un)luck. If you have to earn luck; what is being unlucky? Someone earned a succession of crap? It is maybe predetermined since the beginning of the universe how (un)lucky I am if only we could track every particle since the big bang (or whatever booted up time and space) but that is not very helpful if the economy crashes and I get some horrible disease just when I launched my new venture.
    - sfttty 7y ago
      The unlucky is the absence of reasons to be lucky or even reasons to be unlucky. There is no science there, but I like to think about luck as money: we make an investment by doing something for others and later get back more of the same.
greggman2 7y ago
Zuckerberg's luck is what makes him CEO of one of the FANG companies and not just another engineer at any random tech company. We can all point to minor changes in someone's life path that if changed would not put them where they are today. If Yahoo had purchased Google Larry Page and Serge Brin would also likely just be engineers at some random company and not leaders of one of the largest/richest companies in the world. Reading Creativity Inc, about Catmull and Pixar there was so much luck. Catmull was president of Pixar and now President of Disney Animation but Pixar would probably never have existed if Lucas had sold them to someone other than Steve Job. It also wouldn't exist if Jobs had been unwilling to lose 70 million on trying to make them a computer company and then giving them a chance to pivot to animation and instead shut it down. Catmull would likely have been a successful engineering manager but he would not likely be in his current top position. I don't at all agree with the other statements in this thread that suggested people in these positions are top level skilled vs others. People see these people's skills through rose colored glasses of their success.
turk73 7y ago
I don't personally believe the narrative around the founding of Facebook. The story you know is the story they told you. Suppose for a moment the stories behind these tech giants isn't what you're told it is. Suppose there is an intelligence agency backing all these tech successes and placed certain people in control of them because those certain people are loyal? That isn't luck, then, is it? Luck would be that someone at a random State U. had these ideas and was able to successfully convert them into success. That is luck. What you see before you today is not luck, but rather part of a design.

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.
  - chx 7y ago
    > 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. Ha that's right. What I must have seen but failed to put into words is https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less https://dri.es/drupal-sucks-less: > All content management systems suck, Drupal just happens to suck less. — Boris Mann at DrupalCON Amsterdam, August 2005. Typo3, Tikiwiki, Phpnuke (heaven forbid), XOOPS, even Mambo/Joomla, these were the systems of the day. Drupal ... sucked less and gained a lot more marketshare.
OnlineGladiator 7y ago
I think that only applies to the category of success. But some people are just born rich. Some people are just born healthy, attractive, and even happy! Research suggests half of life satisfaction is determined by your genes. https://positivepsychology.com/is-happiness-genetic/ https://positivepsychology.com/is-happiness-genetic/ What's luckier than winning the genetic lottery?
james_s_tayler 7y ago
That's working out real well for Africa.
- foogazi 7y ago
  you don’t think people are successful in Africa?
  - james_s_tayler 7y ago
    In aggregate? No. By virtue of not being born there I'm better off than the vast majority. Sure, I work hard at what I do. I'm also lucky a series of lucky and unlucky events transpired the way they did in order for there to exist an opportunity for me to work hard at something and do well. Luck is 90% of it for pretty much everyone.
    - foogazi 7y ago
      better off !== success
      - james_s_tayler 7y ago
        Keep telling yourself that.
Neil44 7y ago
Plenty of people work like slaves their whole lives and don’t do all that well.

friendlybus 7y ago

The "luck" of Zuckerberg seems to imply it was a random event he was at Harvard and that he didn't intend to be there. That story is about the meaning of being at a place like Harvard, you have the tools and people around you to see and take advantage of opportunities before others. The conflict behind the story is whether your suffering is the result of something random or meaningful. Someone who does the best they can at a lesser university and gets lesser results is not a result of randomness, but the meaning (or properties, qualities) of being at a lesser university and the choices made beforehand. Attributing randomness to big successes undermines the hard work that a lot of people go through to get one step up the chain.

OnlineGladiator 7y ago
> Attributing randomness to big successes undermines the hard work that a lot of people go through to get one step up the chain. This is my entire argument. There's a much easier way to phrase it though: life's not fair.
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  To me "life's not fair" reads as a contradiction to the cited statement. As I understand it GP's argument was that, yes it may have been luck to meet the right people at the right time, but that a lot of conscious decision and discipline went into being in the right position at the right time beforehand. Reading it that way, life is fair, since it rewarded the work previously put into building up a life's success. Another way to say it would be: If facebook hadn't made Zuckerberg a billionaire, something else would have made him at least a huge success (the stellar kinds of successes that people like Zuckerberg experience are probably still insanely unlikely even in the world of billionaires)
- friendlybus 7y ago
  I don't mean to guarantee success in the face of randomness, but rather to understand and highlight the meaning of making a good decision at the right time, regardless of the fortune or misfortune of luck.
- friendlybus 7y ago

isoos 7y ago

I think you can somewhat control your potential for luck, which IIRC Dilbert-creator Scott Adams called: your luck surface. The more you expose yourself to get lucky, the better your chances will be. Of course it doesn't work much with gambling, so I guess there is a cost function that needs to be considered too.

awesome_dude 7y ago
The cost function is the gaining of skills to make you good. Whilst upskilling, you're not out catching your lucky chance, you're busy reading/studying/practising.

paulpauper 7y ago

being good beats luck. being good allows one to to repeat successes whereas luck is often a one-time thing people who are the most successful are better than 99.9% of the people in the same field or area. They know the subtleties and intricacies of mastery that elude the majority of people. Zuck had been doing coding and other projects for years before creating Facebook. He didn't just overnight come up with this idea and learn all the skills needed to create it. This was a decade in the making for him.

Jarwain 7y ago
I guess the idea is that success is the combination of luck and skill. No amount of luck matters if they don't have the skill. Someone can be incredibly skilled, and not have the same impact if they don't get lucky
ericd 7y ago
Put another way, they’re related - being good dramatically increases your luck surface area.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I like to put it as being becalmed in a lake with the sail up. When the wind comes, you pick it up and ride ahead with it. With the sale stowed, you miss the opportunity.
  - ericd 7y ago
    Hm I like that.

fredophile 7y ago

I agree that if I had to choose I'd rather be lucky than good. However, I can't affect my luck. I can do things that impact how good I am so that I don't need as much luck to be successful. I can also affect how many times I try. Repeated attempts should yield success eventually, possibly not in one lifetime, even if I'm unlucky.

sfttty 7y ago
IMHO, luck needs to be earned. There must be a reason for luck. Some may argue that some people are born smart and rich and they never did anything to deserve that. Well, even at the very beginning, when there were just a bunch of DNAs mixing up together, the entire process followed the very predictable laws of physics. It wasn't luck or coincidence. It's our interpretation of this physical process invents the identity if that child and attributes it with the undeserved luck, while in reality it's just a predictable physical process that couldn't have a different outcome.
- tluyben2 7y ago
  We have no way of predicting that physical process (not by a very large margin) so reasoning about it that way is quite useless. The inability to predict (perhaps) deterministic physical processes is randomness and (un)luck. If you have to earn luck; what is being unlucky? Someone earned a succession of crap? It is maybe predetermined since the beginning of the universe how (un)lucky I am if only we could track every particle since the big bang (or whatever booted up time and space) but that is not very helpful if the economy crashes and I get some horrible disease just when I launched my new venture.
  - sfttty 7y ago
    The unlucky is the absence of reasons to be lucky or even reasons to be unlucky. There is no science there, but I like to think about luck as money: we make an investment by doing something for others and later get back more of the same.

greggman2 7y ago

Zuckerberg's luck is what makes him CEO of one of the FANG companies and not just another engineer at any random tech company. We can all point to minor changes in someone's life path that if changed would not put them where they are today. If Yahoo had purchased Google Larry Page and Serge Brin would also likely just be engineers at some random company and not leaders of one of the largest/richest companies in the world. Reading Creativity Inc, about Catmull and Pixar there was so much luck. Catmull was president of Pixar and now President of Disney Animation but Pixar would probably never have existed if Lucas had sold them to someone other than Steve Job. It also wouldn't exist if Jobs had been unwilling to lose 70 million on trying to make them a computer company and then giving them a chance to pivot to animation and instead shut it down. Catmull would likely have been a successful engineering manager but he would not likely be in his current top position. I don't at all agree with the other statements in this thread that suggested people in these positions are top level skilled vs others. People see these people's skills through rose colored glasses of their success.

turk73 7y ago

I don't personally believe the narrative around the founding of Facebook. The story you know is the story they told you. Suppose for a moment the stories behind these tech giants isn't what you're told it is. Suppose there is an intelligence agency backing all these tech successes and placed certain people in control of them because those certain people are loyal? That isn't luck, then, is it? Luck would be that someone at a random State U. had these ideas and was able to successfully convert them into success. That is luck. What you see before you today is not luck, but rather part of a design.