I heard it put this way: hard work, intelligence, and other factors increase your surface area for luck. Think of yourself like a luck gathering net and you wan

I heard it put this way: hard work, intelligence, and other factors increase your surface area for luck. Think of yourself like a luck gathering net and you want the net to be large if you want to have a high probability of getting lucky. Of course this also partly explains why wealth tends to flow uphill: the rich have large nets.