The reason to attribute these successes to luck is its fundamental to a lot of industries and particularly to software that success is self-fulfilling. It's not

The reason to attribute these successes to luck is its fundamental to a lot of industries and particularly to software that success is self-fulfilling. It's not luck that a company became the dominant operating system company in the 90s - it was inevitable, economies of scale and the advantages of a software ecosystem built on top of one common operating system are enormous. It was luck that that operating system happened to be MS DOS/Windows and not one of the dozens of other basically interchangeable operating systems - hell, a different CP/M clone would've ended up on the IBM PC. You can say it's some sort of coping mechanism, but actually I believe that most of my own success is luck. I would say I'm successful, I'm good at what I do and I'm rewarded very well for it. Skill and hard work are a prerequisite of my success but the success itself is largely down to luck. Skill and hard work are table stakes. To put the equally uncharitable interpretation of your view of the world: The fact is that most success is significantly down to luck, but people don't like that because everyone wants to be the hero in their own story rather than just someone who got lucky.