8 ms·

Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilt

Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. I'm reading "So good they can't ignore you" and although I'm loving it, it's also guilty of that. Cal Newport tells the story of a Clean Tech VC and how he got the job using a personal connection to VC. But then he dismisses it by saying that "such small breaks are relatively common". Why is it so hard to admit that someone success is partially due to luck?

sidlls 4y ago
Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have retired with the same 401k any other white collar worker would have but for the sheer luck of choosing the right company at the right time to win an IPO lottery. I wouldn’t have got hired without the work I put in: but there’s no doubt in my mind that my wealth is the product of luck more than that work. Literally billions of people worked harder than I have in that same period of time and have nothing but poverty to show for it. But to hear my engineer peers talk you’d think luck was negligible. They simply don’t want to discount their hard work and bias toward putting much more weight on it than is merited
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don't require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense. It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. They worked hard and smart for decades with nothing that you could identify as being particularly lucky.
  - Teever 4y ago
    Yes, and for every one of those people, there's at least a child or two of theirs who again is back to the completely lucked out scenario because they were born to into a wealthy life, so in the end, it seems like luck plays more of a factor in success than hard work.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Luck, like capital, is all about compounding.
  - ramphastidae 4y ago
    > I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. Can you elaborate? I don’t see how that’s possible unless they started work in their early 20s, have been maxing their retirement, never had an accident or have been unemployed, made incredible investment decisions, and are now 60+? Even then I dont see how it’s possible for blue collar folks. Well into 8 figures is like … at least 30 million.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Assuming it is possible (it's probably not), it certainly wouldn't be possible without the luck of having been in an insanely strong market for whatever blue-collar trade (allegedly) got them there.
    - cduzz 4y ago
      This sounds like a classic "small business owner" success story. One can imagine a scenario where a person owning a landscaping, construction, vehicle repair, or similar business starts out with "can do a thing" and also is good at "get other people to do thing" and "operate / scale business without accidentally going out of business" and so they scale from doing to overseeing to organizing and eventually end up with a business that's got some substantial value. Having been involved in small businesses, it's exhausting and often times it's simply impossible to transition from "doing" to "overseeing" (hiring people to do things is much harder than you'd imagine) and there are plenty of easy ways to accidentally blow the whole thing up. But if it works out, it can work out really well.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  A few mil is very wealthy? I thought it's what every SV code monkey has at 35.
  - sidlls 4y ago
    That may be the picture HN paints. In the real world, "SV code monkey" engineers earn in the very low 6-figures, maybe eventually breaking $200k/year total compensation. Outside of FAANG, they're somewhat better compensated than elsewhere in the country. Within FAANG, most will burn out or plateau around the $250k - $350k total compensation mark. That's certainly affluent, and for the financially literate/careful enough to be "plain old wealthy" (high 6-figure/barely 7-figures after a decade or two). By comparison relatively few, even at FAANG, get to the worth I have unless they've been grinding at FAANG well into their 40s. It does happen, but it's not nearly as common as (perhaps) the picture HN paints implies. Besides that, one must be incredibly lucky to land a FAANG job. Every applicant knows they have to do the leetcode grind and be up on their highly scalable distributed systems design knowledge. There are hundreds of thousands of wanna be FAANG engineers. To be one chosen out of any given round of hiring is sheer luck. The hard work is also required--but it's no harder than any other applicant worked.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > hard work It is not about working hard. It is about working smart, i.e. working on the right things. You choose those things, it is not luck.
  - neetle 4y ago
    This is literally survivorship bias. I'm sure there were people in the same period, working on a similar problem and they didn't hit the IPO lottery.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      The startup was a choice people made. The business plan was a choice. Executing the plan (or failing to execute it) was a choice. Accepting a job at a startup is a choice. Choosing to do an IPO is a choice. No lotteries there.
      - neetle 4y ago
        The fact that they came across the start up in the first place had no element of luck? The fact that they were born with the genetics to be smart enough to contribute to it was fully within their control? The fact that they weren't killed in a car accident when they were 12 was due to their agency? Success is mostly attributable to luck, and ignoring that is just an exercise in outsized ego & shows a sense of agency that borders on the absurd.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        > The fact that they came across the start up in the first place had no element of luck? Did they "come across" it in their mom's basement? > The fact that they were born with the genetics to be smart enough to contribute to it was fully within their control? You don't need to be a genius to be successful. Doing drugs and alcohol is also sure to reduce your smarts. > The fact that they weren't killed in a car accident when they were 12 was due to their agency? You can blame your parents for your life up until 18. After that, it's up to you. > Success is mostly attributable to luck, and ignoring that is just an exercise in outsized ego & shows a sense of agency that borders on the absurd. Baloney. Successful people 1) make their own luck 2) make it easy for luck to find them.
friedman23 4y ago
> Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. Why do you model life as a single bet where you have a 1 or 2% chance of winning? In reality you are making bets every day, each with a range of odds of succeeding and each success can produce a range of outcomes. Look at poker, a game that has a massive "luck" component, people still consistently win.
- Zircom 4y ago
  Poker is a well studied, and more importantly, closed system where all of the variables are either known or known unknowns. We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human. The amount of decisions you make in a game of poker vs the amount you make in a lifetime are not even remotely comparable. And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning. Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life. His point is that it's extremely possible, and in fact happens every day, that you can be a talented, hard worker who put in the same amount of hard work and time that someone else did, and make all the objectively correct choices, and the difference between the levels of success you both achieve can and will be huge.
  - friedman23 4y ago
    > We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human. This is not true but will be at some point. > And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning You haven't met most poker players, they almost all start playing with real money before they even have a clue. What make s poker a truly terrifying game is that you can win a lot while making all the wrong decisions and get hooked for life while being a terrible player. > Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life. Yes, there are many unfortunate people that have made life altering decisions while young and the decisions follow them forever. Thankfully not all failures in life hold such dire consequences, in fact some failures seem like the end of the world but in reality the consequences are not as big as you expect (eg getting fired from your first job or failing an exam).
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
There's a theory that admitting you have no control over you own life is too scary for most people. Believing that your local witchdoctor/economist can predict the weather/economy is perhaps stupid. Believing in Karma might be too. But what's the alternative? Accepting you live in an uncaring universe where you have no control and terrible things could happen to good people at any time? Much more psychologically safe to blame the victim as a way to ward off the thought that you could suffer the same fate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
paulclinger 4y ago
I agree with the role of luck and yet it can't be the only explanation. After all, winning the lottery is pure luck, but buying the ticket isn't. People are taking risks (monetary, reputational, personal, opportunity, etc.) putting ourselves out there, increasing their "luck surface", so when the luck strikes they are the one that can benefit from it.
WalterBright 4y ago
Luck is the particular details. Not luck is the broad arc of one's career. For example, you're not going to meet a parter sitting in your basement. You meet one by going out and interacting with people. The particular partner you wind up with is luck, but finding someone compatible is not. I.e. the trick is to enable luck to find you. At some point, it becomes inevitable. For another example, stock investing. You can't make money in stocks if you don't invest in stocks. Individual stock performance is a bit of a crap shoot. But if you're a patient investor, pick good companies, follow a sensible investment plan, the math is inevitable that you're going to make money in it.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I think a lot of people underestimate the persistence factor. A lot of getting lucky is about getting through the times when you are unlucky. If you can weather the storm, the sun comes out eventually. People like stories of people who bet it all on black and win, though, so they think that's the model for success. Really, the way to win is just to not lose.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    That's one way to put it. Another way is you're not going to get rich from stock options if you don't get a STEM job, and you won't get a STEM job without going to college and getting a STEM degree, and you're not going to college unless you stay in school and graduate. Lots and lots of choices one made to get there.
  - Timon3 4y ago
    Persistence is very important, but we also can't ignore the factors allowing for persistence. If two people fail with their startup and only one goes on to found a new one, the two-time founder is not necessarily more persistent. Maybe he has a social safety net and the other one doesn't, maybe he is only responsible for himself and the other one has a family, maybe he happens to get a loan which the other doesn't. Treating each and every case as fully comparable based on just their outcome merely hurts those that have already been hurt.

sidlls 4y ago

Because few people are objective enough to put aside their deep emotional attachment to the notion that their particular bit of hard work and skill meant nothing without that luck. I’m wealthy now: very wealthy by any standard (mid 7-figure net worth). I came from humble beginnings (nearly homeless frequently as a youth with a single mom), but I am quite intelligent (PhD in physics) and I worked hard. I would have retired with the same 401k any other white collar worker would have but for the sheer luck of choosing the right company at the right time to win an IPO lottery. I wouldn’t have got hired without the work I put in: but there’s no doubt in my mind that my wealth is the product of luck more than that work. Literally billions of people worked harder than I have in that same period of time and have nothing but poverty to show for it. But to hear my engineer peers talk you’d think luck was negligible. They simply don’t want to discount their hard work and bias toward putting much more weight on it than is merited

jandrewrogers 4y ago
Many people with your net worth grind it out without any windfalls, the product of consistent hard work and reasonable choices over decades. It was always a possibility. Most people don't require an IPO to achieve that. Luck can accelerate that outcome but it is not necessary in any meaningful sense. It requires significantly greater extremes of wealth before luck plays a more frequent role. I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. They worked hard and smart for decades with nothing that you could identify as being particularly lucky.
- Teever 4y ago
  Yes, and for every one of those people, there's at least a child or two of theirs who again is back to the completely lucked out scenario because they were born to into a wealthy life, so in the end, it seems like luck plays more of a factor in success than hard work.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Luck, like capital, is all about compounding.
- ramphastidae 4y ago
  > I know people well into 8-figures who were never anything more than blue-collar grinders. Can you elaborate? I don’t see how that’s possible unless they started work in their early 20s, have been maxing their retirement, never had an accident or have been unemployed, made incredible investment decisions, and are now 60+? Even then I dont see how it’s possible for blue collar folks. Well into 8 figures is like … at least 30 million.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    Assuming it is possible (it's probably not), it certainly wouldn't be possible without the luck of having been in an insanely strong market for whatever blue-collar trade (allegedly) got them there.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    This sounds like a classic "small business owner" success story. One can imagine a scenario where a person owning a landscaping, construction, vehicle repair, or similar business starts out with "can do a thing" and also is good at "get other people to do thing" and "operate / scale business without accidentally going out of business" and so they scale from doing to overseeing to organizing and eventually end up with a business that's got some substantial value. Having been involved in small businesses, it's exhausting and often times it's simply impossible to transition from "doing" to "overseeing" (hiring people to do things is much harder than you'd imagine) and there are plenty of easy ways to accidentally blow the whole thing up. But if it works out, it can work out really well.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
A few mil is very wealthy? I thought it's what every SV code monkey has at 35.
- sidlls 4y ago
  That may be the picture HN paints. In the real world, "SV code monkey" engineers earn in the very low 6-figures, maybe eventually breaking $200k/year total compensation. Outside of FAANG, they're somewhat better compensated than elsewhere in the country. Within FAANG, most will burn out or plateau around the $250k - $350k total compensation mark. That's certainly affluent, and for the financially literate/careful enough to be "plain old wealthy" (high 6-figure/barely 7-figures after a decade or two). By comparison relatively few, even at FAANG, get to the worth I have unless they've been grinding at FAANG well into their 40s. It does happen, but it's not nearly as common as (perhaps) the picture HN paints implies. Besides that, one must be incredibly lucky to land a FAANG job. Every applicant knows they have to do the leetcode grind and be up on their highly scalable distributed systems design knowledge. There are hundreds of thousands of wanna be FAANG engineers. To be one chosen out of any given round of hiring is sheer luck. The hard work is also required--but it's no harder than any other applicant worked.
WalterBright 4y ago
> hard work It is not about working hard. It is about working smart, i.e. working on the right things. You choose those things, it is not luck.
- neetle 4y ago
  This is literally survivorship bias. I'm sure there were people in the same period, working on a similar problem and they didn't hit the IPO lottery.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    The startup was a choice people made. The business plan was a choice. Executing the plan (or failing to execute it) was a choice. Accepting a job at a startup is a choice. Choosing to do an IPO is a choice. No lotteries there.
    - neetle 4y ago
      The fact that they came across the start up in the first place had no element of luck? The fact that they were born with the genetics to be smart enough to contribute to it was fully within their control? The fact that they weren't killed in a car accident when they were 12 was due to their agency? Success is mostly attributable to luck, and ignoring that is just an exercise in outsized ego & shows a sense of agency that borders on the absurd.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        > The fact that they came across the start up in the first place had no element of luck? Did they "come across" it in their mom's basement? > The fact that they were born with the genetics to be smart enough to contribute to it was fully within their control? You don't need to be a genius to be successful. Doing drugs and alcohol is also sure to reduce your smarts. > The fact that they weren't killed in a car accident when they were 12 was due to their agency? You can blame your parents for your life up until 18. After that, it's up to you. > Success is mostly attributable to luck, and ignoring that is just an exercise in outsized ego & shows a sense of agency that borders on the absurd. Baloney. Successful people 1) make their own luck 2) make it easy for luck to find them.

friedman23 4y ago

> Not accounting for luck as a factor of success is one of my pet peeves. Why do you model life as a single bet where you have a 1 or 2% chance of winning? In reality you are making bets every day, each with a range of odds of succeeding and each success can produce a range of outcomes. Look at poker, a game that has a massive "luck" component, people still consistently win.

Zircom 4y ago
Poker is a well studied, and more importantly, closed system where all of the variables are either known or known unknowns. We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human. The amount of decisions you make in a game of poker vs the amount you make in a lifetime are not even remotely comparable. And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning. Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life. His point is that it's extremely possible, and in fact happens every day, that you can be a talented, hard worker who put in the same amount of hard work and time that someone else did, and make all the objectively correct choices, and the difference between the levels of success you both achieve can and will be huge.
- friedman23 4y ago
  > We literally have bots now that can play poker better than any human. This is not true but will be at some point. > And unlike life, in poker there's no risk in making bad decisions during the game while you're still learning You haven't met most poker players, they almost all start playing with real money before they even have a clue. What make s poker a truly terrifying game is that you can win a lot while making all the wrong decisions and get hooked for life while being a terrible player. > Worst case scenario you just start a new game until you get the hang of it. Life is not like that. There's no practice run, and when you make what turns out to be the wrong decision it can follow you around for the rest of your life. Yes, there are many unfortunate people that have made life altering decisions while young and the decisions follow them forever. Thankfully not all failures in life hold such dire consequences, in fact some failures seem like the end of the world but in reality the consequences are not as big as you expect (eg getting fired from your first job or failing an exam).

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

There's a theory that admitting you have no control over you own life is too scary for most people. Believing that your local witchdoctor/economist can predict the weather/economy is perhaps stupid. Believing in Karma might be too. But what's the alternative? Accepting you live in an uncaring universe where you have no control and terrible things could happen to good people at any time? Much more psychologically safe to blame the victim as a way to ward off the thought that you could suffer the same fate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

paulclinger 4y ago

I agree with the role of luck and yet it can't be the only explanation. After all, winning the lottery is pure luck, but buying the ticket isn't. People are taking risks (monetary, reputational, personal, opportunity, etc.) putting ourselves out there, increasing their "luck surface", so when the luck strikes they are the one that can benefit from it.

WalterBright 4y ago

Luck is the particular details. Not luck is the broad arc of one's career. For example, you're not going to meet a parter sitting in your basement. You meet one by going out and interacting with people. The particular partner you wind up with is luck, but finding someone compatible is not. I.e. the trick is to enable luck to find you. At some point, it becomes inevitable. For another example, stock investing. You can't make money in stocks if you don't invest in stocks. Individual stock performance is a bit of a crap shoot. But if you're a patient investor, pick good companies, follow a sensible investment plan, the math is inevitable that you're going to make money in it.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I think a lot of people underestimate the persistence factor. A lot of getting lucky is about getting through the times when you are unlucky. If you can weather the storm, the sun comes out eventually. People like stories of people who bet it all on black and win, though, so they think that's the model for success. Really, the way to win is just to not lose.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  That's one way to put it. Another way is you're not going to get rich from stock options if you don't get a STEM job, and you won't get a STEM job without going to college and getting a STEM degree, and you're not going to college unless you stay in school and graduate. Lots and lots of choices one made to get there.
- Timon3 4y ago
  Persistence is very important, but we also can't ignore the factors allowing for persistence. If two people fail with their startup and only one goes on to found a new one, the two-time founder is not necessarily more persistent. Maybe he has a social safety net and the other one doesn't, maybe he is only responsible for himself and the other one has a family, maybe he happens to get a loan which the other doesn't. Treating each and every case as fully comparable based on just their outcome merely hurts those that have already been hurt.