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I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it a

by syops 6y ago

I very much enjoyed reading your post. You made a statement that, taken literally, I disagree with and wonder if you care to elaborate more on it. I made it and you can too. It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's smart and ambitious and quite lucky.

vorpalhex 6y ago
I didn't have it as hard as the parent, but I remember choosing between bus fare and meals quite a few times. My first paycheck was spent on white bread and a tube of sausage, and now I live a pretty comfortable life. Most everyone in my orbit has improved their situation too. Sometimes that was with help from a family member, but generally things have gotten better for friends who were in the same circumstances I was. The two exceptions are those who got into drugs and never got out (a few folks I know seemed to never have issues, but they're the exception and not the rule) and a single friend who has some non-drug problems that probably need counseling work.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  This is my experience too - almost everyone who hung out with me in the library, computer lab or metal shop seemed to do fairly well for themselves - not like 200k tech job well but like 80k blue collar or white collar when most of us grew up with less than 40k combined household income. Half of us first or second generation immigrants and refugees, lots of broken families, lots of substance abuse, lots from Romania, Serbia, Irab, Iraq, China. IMO it was passion for reading and building things with our hands that that seperated our cohort from the rest - that and the bond between those of us who knew we hadn't much of a safety net to rely on.
  - cammikebrown 6y ago
    I’m not sure of your age, but for instance, my dad, the sole breadwinner at the time, made $40k/year in 1989 when I was born, which is equivalent to $84k today. So, making $80k now and being raised on $40k/year then are the same thing if you adjust for inflation. (Furthermore, I’d argue healthcare, college, and housing are much more expensive now than they were then.)
    - andromeduck 6y ago
      I'm 28 now so this was about a decae ago. I personally never expected to make much more than 50k out of college, 100k by 35 career wise until my first internship. I think I can still live quite happily with ~60k by myself or ~90k with a loving family. Good books and good company were all I had and all I think I'll ever need - that and the satisfaction of a job well done be it a piece of code well written, a field well groomed and raked or a McDonalds well wiped and scrubbed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
YinglingLight 6y ago
It seems to me that luck plays a huge role The concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/ https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/ Those who accrue and leverage a variety of skills tend to get 'lucky'. This is why you could strip most entrepreneurs of all their money and assets, and not be surprised to see them enjoying success in 5 years. You put into place a system that makes making the right decisions inevitable, and learning from the wrong decisions. To believe that your success is out of your hands is incredibly disempowering. I understand it's primary function is to help you empathize with others, but it subconsciously has a hold on you. A very limiting belief, I'd 'yeet' it immediately.
- scsilver 6y ago
  Remove them from their network and see what happens.
  - pbronez 6y ago
    Sure, but social capital is an asset you build like anything else. Remove a big chunk of anyone’s wealth - liquid, paper, social, health - and it’s gonna be painful and disruptive. The point isn’t that they’d be poor if you took away what they built... it’s that they succeed in building it in the first place! That process of building wealth in all its forms is the key. It’s not easy. It’s definitely not fair. Some people start out way ahead. Some people start out way behind and don’t even have role models to show how it’s done. It always takes time. My view is that you just have to accept people where they are, respect their efforts, politely look past their structural (dis)advantages, and deal with them as human beings who deserve love and support for their own sake.
    - pnutjam 6y ago
      I think a big part of it is also the moral choices people are willing to make. Most people climb to success because they are incredibly talented (rare), incredibly lucky (nobody likes to admit it), or because it's always bowb your buddy week to them. Sometimes they are able to do a minor hurt to a vast number of people (marketing, some sales, etc...) and they don't feel like they are doing anything wrong. Sometimes they are just conforming to the standards our society has set, (everybody is doing it). I myself try to do the best, but I've discovered the only way to advance is to job hop my way to a decent salary. I'm sure this has caused problems for others, but it's accepted in this industry. I've seen others who won't job hop languish with much lower salaries.
dionidium 6y ago
Of course luck plays a factor in everything everybody does. The question isn't whether luck plays a role; it's how much salience it deserves. This person made hundreds of good choices across decades to achieve the success they have, so it seems a bit perverse to focus instead on the hundreds of things outside their control.
- jschwartzi 6y ago
  luck is just another word for other people.
- II2II 6y ago
  Luck was not mentioned to diminish what the person has accomplished. It was intended to point out that their story may be difficult to replicate.
  - old_fart_dev 6y ago
    Re-read the objected to line: "I made it and you can too." Note that I emphasized "can" in that quote. "Can", not "will". This isn't a guarantee by throwaway-0987, it's words of encouragement to try. On a forum that celebrates startup moonshots, I find it odd that anyone would piss on the idea that trying is worth while.
    - KittenInABox 6y ago
      I genuinely don't know if even "can" is applicable to allpoor people in this context. A person who has a similar background but ended up with a chronic illness preventing them from working... that dream of working for 200k/yr is impossible.
      - tobib 6y ago
        We're not even talking about "that dream of working for 200k/yr" but the dream of living a decent life
jbluepolarbear 6y ago
I think it’s not so much luck, but perseverance. I have a similar poor upbringing and I have built a pretty comfortable life by never letting myself get too down and always keep working towards a better life. Being smart helps, but really the best thing that works for me is being okay with failure. When you’re poor you fail a lot, being able to take that failure and learn from it separates the successful and the unsuccessful. If you’re rich none of this matters because life isn’t fair.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  See you are disregarding all the luck a person had while being born in the right side of the world. I would say being born in the first world, even if poor, is a huge privilege which large parts of the world can't get. You win that lottery, and you already have a huge leg up. Now I don't want to convert this thread into misery olympics, all sadness is valid if felt genuinely and just because you are privilege in one sense doesn't mean your life is not incredibly hard. But if you think the large amounts of generationally poor, even in the first world, lack perseverance then you don't understand the game.
  - jbluepolarbear 6y ago
    I can only pull from my experiences, but I have witnessed many in my family and other poor families that only work hard enough to get what they need. And very few go beyond that and work for what they want. It’s hard, exhausting work. I regularly slept less than 4 hours because I’d be up all night working jobs, projects, anything to get a better life. My mom is mixed and my dad is white, I look like my mom but with really light skin. Being mostly white and not having my moms Arabic name helped get interviews and my foot in the door. What some see as luck is others using absolutely every advantage they can muster to go further than they would be able to otherwise.
  - andi999 6y ago
    Actually most of the third world has been progressing as well (with exceptions of course)
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The important part is to focus on the things you can control. Luck always plays a role, but your own actions decide how prepared you are to capitalize on lucky breaks when they arrive. Luck is important, but it’s a mistake to try to attribute the success of others purely to luck. Someone winning the lottery is lucky. Someone who gets hired because a company noticed their quality GitHub commits to a project relevant to their needs is also lucky, but their success isn’t the result of luck alone.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Yeah there's also thousands of potential opportunities like that over course of years, each with the potential to open new doors. One lucky break does not success make and a lucky break without the talent or drive to back it quickly collapses.
grumple 6y ago
I have a similar story and luck played no part of it. I spent lots of time in public libraries and on public computers as a kid. As a result, I got an academic scholarship. A few years after graduating amidst the 2008 economic crisis, I heard about a company that used a particular programming language. I learned that language and convinced someone I knew at the company to get me an interview. I aced the interview and got the job. A lot of studying and a couple of job interviews later and I'm making good money at another company. If you study the right things, you'll get "lucky" in interviews because the more problems you've seen in the domain, the more likely you are to be tested against the knowledge you've already acquired. But that's clearly not luck - it's preparation. You won't ace every interview, but you'll do well in enough. I made the wrong decisions several times. I lacked focus in and after university that cost me several years in my twenties. As soon as I made a plan to change things, the plan worked. When a plan goes wrong, you evaluate and make a new plan. Every idea doesn't always work - you just need one that does.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  someone I knew at the company Sounds fortunate. This is one aspect where I too have been "lucky" in the past, but you have to be both lucky and good.
  - grumple 6y ago
    I think the key is looking at the opportunities that you have, whatever they may be, and putting in the work to take advantage of them. I have hundreds of friends who are relatively poor and who have many opportunities they don’t take. For example, I’ve offered to give free guidance or instruction to many, but it turns out most people don’t want to take advantage of that. I told people I could hire them (into the very same role I first had), but they didn’t recognize the opportunity. People want easy, so they ignore opportunities like this in their lives.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Definitely agree that it's frustrating to offer to teach someone to code or something, and they act like "Who the F are you to think you can teach me?" or "Nah, seems boring" but then they turn around and resent you for your success. Some of the advice I wish friends would take is this: accept help wherever you can get it, as long as it won't distort your relationship or create an untenable dependency.
beaner 6y ago
If it came down to hundreds of decisions along the way, not just one or two, that isn't luck. She's a good decision maker.
- craftinator 6y ago
  Bad decisions can have good outcomes. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, so really it depends on how often you get lucky. I think charisma has the greatest effect on this.
  - beaner 6y ago
    This is what people who make bad decisions tell themselves.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    I would argue if bad decision leads to better outcome then it is a good decision.
jinjin2 6y ago
> along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. And probably and equal amount of decisions that could have turned out better. So rather than being the result of one or two lucky or unlucky events, the final outcome is more likely to be the average of the quality of all the decisions over time.
- clairity 6y ago
  no, it depends on the shape of the modeling function, and sociobiological functions are highly complex, possibly unknowable, but certainly not a simple linear function around which decisions revert to the same mean. for instance, consider success to be a knowable function (like y = ax^2 + bx + c ). luck would be like having high (initial) coefficients and constants through no effort of your own (e.g., being born into a wealthy, connected family). hard work and good decisions might allow you to increase (or decrease through neglect/bad decisions) these coefficients at the margin, but the relative advantage often remains many multiples of the disadvantaged.
kungito 6y ago
I think this issue is very important and when I think about it I cannot help but think the answer lies all the way down in the question whether we have free will. Some people say "you have to be perseverant like me and you will make it and often time we think about people who have simply cannot be perseverant enough but they are good people. Can they be better "if they wanted it more" or "if someone helped them" and who would that person be? People especially here have stories with "I was in a bad situation but I worked hard learning coding" while many people were in a similar situation but didn't pick up coding as these people did. Are they to blame and did the other people pick coding because they knew it would launch them to great heights?
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Are they to blame I think we’ve become so afraid of giving the impression of victim-blaming people who are down on their luck that we’re afraid to acknowledge that people can and do work their way into better life circumstances. Even if we think of luck as the central determinant of a person’s success in life, then we still have to acknowledge that the person’s own choices and actions will pivot their destiny around that luck. Licking in to a dream job through connections and serendipity doesn’t go very far if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job, for example.
  - craftinator 6y ago
    > if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job I read this rhetoric constantly, then I look at a bunch of hard working people that I know, who are poor. Luck is the opportunity to succeed, hard work is the way to capitalize on that opportunity. One without the other means no success. And on that same note, you can make "good decision" that cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities, and "bad decisions" that end you up in with great opportunities. I've made plenty of decisions that I thought at the time were kinda dumb, but put me in serendipitous situations which ended up landing me great jobs. So really, the luckier you are, the more chances you'll have to escape poverty; if you're willing to work hard at those critical times, you'll actually succeed.
  - 6y ago
sologoub 6y ago
As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same? I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people even if it’s a long shot. For all those reading this who are in a bad place financially or otherwise - YOU CAN DO IT! Do not listen to nay sayers and just do your best (or better yet, do even better - you can never really know your own limits/potential unless you try). It’s not a done deal, but is better than the alternative.
- nameequalsmain 6y ago
  I don't think the point is to belittle their accomplishments, but rather a realistic take on poverty. A lot of people try really hard, and still cannot get out of poverty. This is something we as a society need to deal with, and not disregard a systematic problem with anecdotal success stories and saying "You can too!"
- solidasparagus 6y ago
  If you read "you can do it" as encouragement to others in the same situation, it's a good thing. When you read it as a justification for why we shouldn't expand the social net, it's pretty terrible. No one is trying to belittle OP's accomplishments, but "I did it and you can too" sounds like a line from an anti-welfare politician so it shouldn't be surprising that many people take issue with it.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Agreed. "It can be done" would be a more appropriate phrasing, IMO. I dug myself out of worse circumstances than OP described, but it took a lot of luck, persistence, and a good amount of risk taking to get there. I guess it helped that I was at a point where I didn't have much to lose, so, risk taking seemed less risky than staying where I was.
  - syops 6y ago
chunkyfunky 6y ago
As someone who came from a fairly poor background (not half as as bad as the OP to be fair) and who has managed to "break out" I can say for sure that looking back I had a ton of lucky breaks - but, and this to me is crucial, only after I stopped worrying about what might go wrong and focus on what I could do right. If I had predicated my success on somehow getting lucky I don't think I would have made it. So to me - and not wanting to speak for the OP of course - but the way I look at this is that the simple encouragement of "I made it and you can too" is more motivating than "I made it but then again looking back I had a ton of lucky coincidences that you probably won't have so, sure, try it, but don't expect success" :)
- wwweston 6y ago
  Thanks for articulating this. I'd already wondered why I both like and dislike "I made it and you can too" and you captured it. It's good for motivation and ... less good for social policy.
- taurath 6y ago
  I only think of it as “failure is understandable and doesn’t reflect on you as a person” - but you bring up a good point. I have no patience for people who say “because I made it everyone else can too” which is a really common attitude. People play up their adversity (understandable; it’s the adversity one has had) and downplay their advantages. Lack of empathy and help for those struggling is unacceptable to me. As people succeed they tend to stop congregating around those that don’t, and I think that’s fine but to sit around those successful and vote against policies to help those not succeeding is to me a moral failing. For those struggling through poverty - one must know that one CAN succeed, or else you end up in a psychological hole waiting for the next nibble of luck. A tempered balance of both optimism and also a real social safety net seems like the best of both worlds to me.
EvilEy3 6y ago
Luck is opportunity + skills. It is not some arcane skill that you're born with or not.
estaseuropano 6y ago
Probably nearly everyone can make it. Even the Pakistani kid born into intergenerational debt slavery that means he is making bricks from when he's 5 years old and has no access to school, healthcare or balanced nutrition. It's a difference of a 50% chance for the luckiest to 0.00005% chance for the least lucky. But to see the world through the lens 'everyone van make it, just put effort and stop worrying' is simply absurd.
sershe 6y ago
Aside from the socioeconomic circumstances of one's birth, luck favors the prepared. I also come from a poor background and got "lucky" a few times in my life (in particular the sequence of events leading to me joining a US tech company while making web apps in Russia was rather tenuous), but the cause for the luck each time was prep. E.g. I aced an interview question on GC design because, after doing some GC tuning for a web app at work I read GC docs and then a couple research papers at home to understand it better. After the (group) interview loop, someone told me they were asked a hypothetical SQL backend design question they had trouble with, and I realized I knew then how SQL Server solved that, for similar reasons, so I could have aced that question too. Sure, I could have gotten yet another design question that I knew nothing about ("unlucky"), but to even have a chance to get "lucky" you need to prepare... to win the lottery you at a minimum need to buy a ticket ;) As for the luck of the birth, almost by definition, when you are poor you grow up surrounded by people in similar circumstances; if you "make it", it is very easy to judge those who didn't, because well, they were in similar circumstances to you and you saw what they did differently, often in detail.

by syops 6y ago

vorpalhex 6y ago

I didn't have it as hard as the parent, but I remember choosing between bus fare and meals quite a few times. My first paycheck was spent on white bread and a tube of sausage, and now I live a pretty comfortable life. Most everyone in my orbit has improved their situation too. Sometimes that was with help from a family member, but generally things have gotten better for friends who were in the same circumstances I was. The two exceptions are those who got into drugs and never got out (a few folks I know seemed to never have issues, but they're the exception and not the rule) and a single friend who has some non-drug problems that probably need counseling work.

andromeduck 6y ago
This is my experience too - almost everyone who hung out with me in the library, computer lab or metal shop seemed to do fairly well for themselves - not like 200k tech job well but like 80k blue collar or white collar when most of us grew up with less than 40k combined household income. Half of us first or second generation immigrants and refugees, lots of broken families, lots of substance abuse, lots from Romania, Serbia, Irab, Iraq, China. IMO it was passion for reading and building things with our hands that that seperated our cohort from the rest - that and the bond between those of us who knew we hadn't much of a safety net to rely on.
- cammikebrown 6y ago
  I’m not sure of your age, but for instance, my dad, the sole breadwinner at the time, made $40k/year in 1989 when I was born, which is equivalent to $84k today. So, making $80k now and being raised on $40k/year then are the same thing if you adjust for inflation. (Furthermore, I’d argue healthcare, college, and housing are much more expensive now than they were then.)
  - andromeduck 6y ago
    I'm 28 now so this was about a decae ago. I personally never expected to make much more than 50k out of college, 100k by 35 career wise until my first internship. I think I can still live quite happily with ~60k by myself or ~90k with a loving family. Good books and good company were all I had and all I think I'll ever need - that and the satisfaction of a job well done be it a piece of code well written, a field well groomed and raked or a McDonalds well wiped and scrubbed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

YinglingLight 6y ago

It seems to me that luck plays a huge role The concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/ https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/ Those who accrue and leverage a variety of skills tend to get 'lucky'. This is why you could strip most entrepreneurs of all their money and assets, and not be surprised to see them enjoying success in 5 years. You put into place a system that makes making the right decisions inevitable, and learning from the wrong decisions. To believe that your success is out of your hands is incredibly disempowering. I understand it's primary function is to help you empathize with others, but it subconsciously has a hold on you. A very limiting belief, I'd 'yeet' it immediately.

scsilver 6y ago
Remove them from their network and see what happens.
- pbronez 6y ago
  Sure, but social capital is an asset you build like anything else. Remove a big chunk of anyone’s wealth - liquid, paper, social, health - and it’s gonna be painful and disruptive. The point isn’t that they’d be poor if you took away what they built... it’s that they succeed in building it in the first place! That process of building wealth in all its forms is the key. It’s not easy. It’s definitely not fair. Some people start out way ahead. Some people start out way behind and don’t even have role models to show how it’s done. It always takes time. My view is that you just have to accept people where they are, respect their efforts, politely look past their structural (dis)advantages, and deal with them as human beings who deserve love and support for their own sake.
  - pnutjam 6y ago
    I think a big part of it is also the moral choices people are willing to make. Most people climb to success because they are incredibly talented (rare), incredibly lucky (nobody likes to admit it), or because it's always bowb your buddy week to them. Sometimes they are able to do a minor hurt to a vast number of people (marketing, some sales, etc...) and they don't feel like they are doing anything wrong. Sometimes they are just conforming to the standards our society has set, (everybody is doing it). I myself try to do the best, but I've discovered the only way to advance is to job hop my way to a decent salary. I'm sure this has caused problems for others, but it's accepted in this industry. I've seen others who won't job hop languish with much lower salaries.

dionidium 6y ago

Of course luck plays a factor in everything everybody does. The question isn't whether luck plays a role; it's how much salience it deserves. This person made hundreds of good choices across decades to achieve the success they have, so it seems a bit perverse to focus instead on the hundreds of things outside their control.

jschwartzi 6y ago
luck is just another word for other people.
II2II 6y ago
Luck was not mentioned to diminish what the person has accomplished. It was intended to point out that their story may be difficult to replicate.
- old_fart_dev 6y ago
  Re-read the objected to line: "I made it and you can too." Note that I emphasized "can" in that quote. "Can", not "will". This isn't a guarantee by throwaway-0987, it's words of encouragement to try. On a forum that celebrates startup moonshots, I find it odd that anyone would piss on the idea that trying is worth while.
  - KittenInABox 6y ago
    I genuinely don't know if even "can" is applicable to allpoor people in this context. A person who has a similar background but ended up with a chronic illness preventing them from working... that dream of working for 200k/yr is impossible.
    - tobib 6y ago
      We're not even talking about "that dream of working for 200k/yr" but the dream of living a decent life

jbluepolarbear 6y ago

I think it’s not so much luck, but perseverance. I have a similar poor upbringing and I have built a pretty comfortable life by never letting myself get too down and always keep working towards a better life. Being smart helps, but really the best thing that works for me is being okay with failure. When you’re poor you fail a lot, being able to take that failure and learn from it separates the successful and the unsuccessful. If you’re rich none of this matters because life isn’t fair.

newswasboring 6y ago
See you are disregarding all the luck a person had while being born in the right side of the world. I would say being born in the first world, even if poor, is a huge privilege which large parts of the world can't get. You win that lottery, and you already have a huge leg up. Now I don't want to convert this thread into misery olympics, all sadness is valid if felt genuinely and just because you are privilege in one sense doesn't mean your life is not incredibly hard. But if you think the large amounts of generationally poor, even in the first world, lack perseverance then you don't understand the game.
- jbluepolarbear 6y ago
  I can only pull from my experiences, but I have witnessed many in my family and other poor families that only work hard enough to get what they need. And very few go beyond that and work for what they want. It’s hard, exhausting work. I regularly slept less than 4 hours because I’d be up all night working jobs, projects, anything to get a better life. My mom is mixed and my dad is white, I look like my mom but with really light skin. Being mostly white and not having my moms Arabic name helped get interviews and my foot in the door. What some see as luck is others using absolutely every advantage they can muster to go further than they would be able to otherwise.
- andi999 6y ago
  Actually most of the third world has been progressing as well (with exceptions of course)

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

The important part is to focus on the things you can control. Luck always plays a role, but your own actions decide how prepared you are to capitalize on lucky breaks when they arrive. Luck is important, but it’s a mistake to try to attribute the success of others purely to luck. Someone winning the lottery is lucky. Someone who gets hired because a company noticed their quality GitHub commits to a project relevant to their needs is also lucky, but their success isn’t the result of luck alone.

andromeduck 6y ago
Yeah there's also thousands of potential opportunities like that over course of years, each with the potential to open new doors. One lucky break does not success make and a lucky break without the talent or drive to back it quickly collapses.

grumple 6y ago

I have a similar story and luck played no part of it. I spent lots of time in public libraries and on public computers as a kid. As a result, I got an academic scholarship. A few years after graduating amidst the 2008 economic crisis, I heard about a company that used a particular programming language. I learned that language and convinced someone I knew at the company to get me an interview. I aced the interview and got the job. A lot of studying and a couple of job interviews later and I'm making good money at another company. If you study the right things, you'll get "lucky" in interviews because the more problems you've seen in the domain, the more likely you are to be tested against the knowledge you've already acquired. But that's clearly not luck - it's preparation. You won't ace every interview, but you'll do well in enough. I made the wrong decisions several times. I lacked focus in and after university that cost me several years in my twenties. As soon as I made a plan to change things, the plan worked. When a plan goes wrong, you evaluate and make a new plan. Every idea doesn't always work - you just need one that does.

nitrogen 6y ago
someone I knew at the company Sounds fortunate. This is one aspect where I too have been "lucky" in the past, but you have to be both lucky and good.
- grumple 6y ago
  I think the key is looking at the opportunities that you have, whatever they may be, and putting in the work to take advantage of them. I have hundreds of friends who are relatively poor and who have many opportunities they don’t take. For example, I’ve offered to give free guidance or instruction to many, but it turns out most people don’t want to take advantage of that. I told people I could hire them (into the very same role I first had), but they didn’t recognize the opportunity. People want easy, so they ignore opportunities like this in their lives.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Definitely agree that it's frustrating to offer to teach someone to code or something, and they act like "Who the F are you to think you can teach me?" or "Nah, seems boring" but then they turn around and resent you for your success. Some of the advice I wish friends would take is this: accept help wherever you can get it, as long as it won't distort your relationship or create an untenable dependency.

beaner 6y ago

If it came down to hundreds of decisions along the way, not just one or two, that isn't luck. She's a good decision maker.

craftinator 6y ago
Bad decisions can have good outcomes. People are notoriously bad at predicting the future, so really it depends on how often you get lucky. I think charisma has the greatest effect on this.
- beaner 6y ago
  This is what people who make bad decisions tell themselves.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  I would argue if bad decision leads to better outcome then it is a good decision.

jinjin2 6y ago

> along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. And probably and equal amount of decisions that could have turned out better. So rather than being the result of one or two lucky or unlucky events, the final outcome is more likely to be the average of the quality of all the decisions over time.

clairity 6y ago
no, it depends on the shape of the modeling function, and sociobiological functions are highly complex, possibly unknowable, but certainly not a simple linear function around which decisions revert to the same mean. for instance, consider success to be a knowable function (like y = ax^2 + bx + c ). luck would be like having high (initial) coefficients and constants through no effort of your own (e.g., being born into a wealthy, connected family). hard work and good decisions might allow you to increase (or decrease through neglect/bad decisions) these coefficients at the margin, but the relative advantage often remains many multiples of the disadvantaged.

kungito 6y ago

I think this issue is very important and when I think about it I cannot help but think the answer lies all the way down in the question whether we have free will. Some people say "you have to be perseverant like me and you will make it and often time we think about people who have simply cannot be perseverant enough but they are good people. Can they be better "if they wanted it more" or "if someone helped them" and who would that person be? People especially here have stories with "I was in a bad situation but I worked hard learning coding" while many people were in a similar situation but didn't pick up coding as these people did. Are they to blame and did the other people pick coding because they knew it would launch them to great heights?

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Are they to blame I think we’ve become so afraid of giving the impression of victim-blaming people who are down on their luck that we’re afraid to acknowledge that people can and do work their way into better life circumstances. Even if we think of luck as the central determinant of a person’s success in life, then we still have to acknowledge that the person’s own choices and actions will pivot their destiny around that luck. Licking in to a dream job through connections and serendipity doesn’t go very far if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job, for example.
- craftinator 6y ago
  > if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job I read this rhetoric constantly, then I look at a bunch of hard working people that I know, who are poor. Luck is the opportunity to succeed, hard work is the way to capitalize on that opportunity. One without the other means no success. And on that same note, you can make "good decision" that cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities, and "bad decisions" that end you up in with great opportunities. I've made plenty of decisions that I thought at the time were kinda dumb, but put me in serendipitous situations which ended up landing me great jobs. So really, the luckier you are, the more chances you'll have to escape poverty; if you're willing to work hard at those critical times, you'll actually succeed.
- 6y ago

sologoub 6y ago

As someone who has experienced pretty rough times (different from the OP), but doing just fine myself, of course luck has a lot to do with it, but why in the world so many people feel so compelled to belittle the accomplishment of OP climbing out and then encouraging others to at least hope for the same? I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people even if it’s a long shot. For all those reading this who are in a bad place financially or otherwise - YOU CAN DO IT! Do not listen to nay sayers and just do your best (or better yet, do even better - you can never really know your own limits/potential unless you try). It’s not a done deal, but is better than the alternative.

nameequalsmain 6y ago
I don't think the point is to belittle their accomplishments, but rather a realistic take on poverty. A lot of people try really hard, and still cannot get out of poverty. This is something we as a society need to deal with, and not disregard a systematic problem with anecdotal success stories and saying "You can too!"
solidasparagus 6y ago
If you read "you can do it" as encouragement to others in the same situation, it's a good thing. When you read it as a justification for why we shouldn't expand the social net, it's pretty terrible. No one is trying to belittle OP's accomplishments, but "I did it and you can too" sounds like a line from an anti-welfare politician so it shouldn't be surprising that many people take issue with it.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Agreed. "It can be done" would be a more appropriate phrasing, IMO. I dug myself out of worse circumstances than OP described, but it took a lot of luck, persistence, and a good amount of risk taking to get there. I guess it helped that I was at a point where I didn't have much to lose, so, risk taking seemed less risky than staying where I was.
- syops 6y ago

chunkyfunky 6y ago

As someone who came from a fairly poor background (not half as as bad as the OP to be fair) and who has managed to "break out" I can say for sure that looking back I had a ton of lucky breaks - but, and this to me is crucial, only after I stopped worrying about what might go wrong and focus on what I could do right. If I had predicated my success on somehow getting lucky I don't think I would have made it. So to me - and not wanting to speak for the OP of course - but the way I look at this is that the simple encouragement of "I made it and you can too" is more motivating than "I made it but then again looking back I had a ton of lucky coincidences that you probably won't have so, sure, try it, but don't expect success" :)

wwweston 6y ago
Thanks for articulating this. I'd already wondered why I both like and dislike "I made it and you can too" and you captured it. It's good for motivation and ... less good for social policy.
taurath 6y ago
I only think of it as “failure is understandable and doesn’t reflect on you as a person” - but you bring up a good point. I have no patience for people who say “because I made it everyone else can too” which is a really common attitude. People play up their adversity (understandable; it’s the adversity one has had) and downplay their advantages. Lack of empathy and help for those struggling is unacceptable to me. As people succeed they tend to stop congregating around those that don’t, and I think that’s fine but to sit around those successful and vote against policies to help those not succeeding is to me a moral failing. For those struggling through poverty - one must know that one CAN succeed, or else you end up in a psychological hole waiting for the next nibble of luck. A tempered balance of both optimism and also a real social safety net seems like the best of both worlds to me.

EvilEy3 6y ago

Luck is opportunity + skills. It is not some arcane skill that you're born with or not.

estaseuropano 6y ago

Probably nearly everyone can make it. Even the Pakistani kid born into intergenerational debt slavery that means he is making bricks from when he's 5 years old and has no access to school, healthcare or balanced nutrition. It's a difference of a 50% chance for the luckiest to 0.00005% chance for the least lucky. But to see the world through the lens 'everyone van make it, just put effort and stop worrying' is simply absurd.

sershe 6y ago

Aside from the socioeconomic circumstances of one's birth, luck favors the prepared. I also come from a poor background and got "lucky" a few times in my life (in particular the sequence of events leading to me joining a US tech company while making web apps in Russia was rather tenuous), but the cause for the luck each time was prep. E.g. I aced an interview question on GC design because, after doing some GC tuning for a web app at work I read GC docs and then a couple research papers at home to understand it better. After the (group) interview loop, someone told me they were asked a hypothetical SQL backend design question they had trouble with, and I realized I knew then how SQL Server solved that, for similar reasons, so I could have aced that question too. Sure, I could have gotten yet another design question that I knew nothing about ("unlucky"), but to even have a chance to get "lucky" you need to prepare... to win the lottery you at a minimum need to buy a ticket ;) As for the luck of the birth, almost by definition, when you are poor you grow up surrounded by people in similar circumstances; if you "make it", it is very easy to judge those who didn't, because well, they were in similar circumstances to you and you saw what they did differently, often in detail.