8 ms·

And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men

93 points by hudibras 14y ago

breckenedge 14y ago
Good article, reminds me of The Myth of the Garage essay by the Heath bros [1]. And the unforgettable high-school slogan "luck (or success) is where preparation meets opportunity." You don't always control the opportunities. [1] http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/ http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/ edit: misquoted the unforgettable
- orangethirty 14y ago
  You don't always control the opportunities. But you can sure show up where they serve them.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Except for when they show up at all-white country clubs.
  - md224 14y ago
    That's true, but (and I may be misreading it here) I feel like the piece speaks to an even deeper element of chance: the chance that you even find your true passion to begin with. If you're in love with a discipline and know you want to excel in it, then you're lucky to have solidified a purpose in your life. Some people take years, decades, maybe their entire lives to discover what it is that truly makes them tick. I'm sure some never do.
    - orangethirty 14y ago
      Do know that a lot of people are just too afraid to even try. Society has put them down so much that they cannot fathom standing up for themselves. Its really sad. Many talented people waste away due to how we decide to run things. Still, survival of the fittest applies here too. If you cannot make your own luck then bad luck. Someone else will.
      - randomdata 14y ago
        Being someone who has always just jumped in and tried whatever I found interesting, it really is amazing see how immobile people often feel. I've had discussions with several people who believe that they cannot try anything without the backing of an educational institution, of which they often do not have time/money available to explore that option, leaving them doing nothing at all.
- jwillgoesfast 14y ago
  I love that quote and the idea behind it. Hard to implement, but good to keep in mind.
aik 14y ago
This reminds me of Peter Thiel's lecture on the question of luck.[1] A focus and care for topics like what this article discusses often falls into the optimistic indeterminism quadrant that he outlines -- ie. we're optimistic about a future that we find largely out of our control, ie. is approaching fairly randomly but we feel good about it. The worry he outlines is that we may be at risk of falling into "pessimistic indeterminism", where Japan has existed for some time and much of Europe, ie. we don't feel good about a future we can't control. I agree that yes many things are indeterminate, and perhaps I can use this knowledge and attempt to take actions to mitigate the bad-unknowns, and not get too angry if things don't always work out, however beyond this what are the lessons to be learned here? I always fear that confirmation bias will take root and a common reaction to articles like this become, "oh, they were just lucky, so my current course [probably of inaction] could also lead to similar success given random chance..." No, that's not what it's saying. Perhaps I'm a deterministic pessimist? [1] http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...
klochner 14y ago
Given that most people working tech in the valley haven't hit a lot of significant roadblocks, this is a great parable for HN to find compassion - we too often write off the less fortunate as merely less talented or hard working.
- frogpelt 14y ago
  The danger comes when, by emphasizing the fortune in the equation, we cause the "less fortunate" to stop trying. Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow.
  - confluence 14y ago
    > Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow. The above statement is logically inconsistent.
    - stan_rogers 14y ago
      No, it isn't, unless you are assuming only circumstance or only "karma" can affect one's path in life. Nothing of the sort was either stated or implied.
alaskamiller 14y ago
That first mil seems to be all work. Then all the millions thereafter seems to be all luck. Or is it the other way around...
- orangethirty 14y ago
  For me it was the first thousand. For some reason I was blocking myself from making more than that. But now, well, I am not blocked anymore. :)
confluence 14y ago
A similar article was discussed yesterday on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174334 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174334 (some good comments there for people who missed it ): My opinion is that success is always accidental. You are the product of your DNA and your environment. There are no great men. Only great situations (see multiple origin of inventions/scientific progress/businesses). Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  One important stroke of luck is to believe that it's not luck. I've been gestating an essay about "useful lies" for a while now. Some things that we know aren't truly true are embraced as if they are true because of the utility of doing so. So for example, believing that success is not related to luck. It's untrue, in my estimation. But if you truly accept it you wind up with silly notions like Insha'Allah and nothing much gets achieved. Or take realism/legalism in law. Sure, judges are biased, judges affect policy yadda yadda. But actually embracing that reality makes the legal system work less well. Meanwhile, "strict and complete legalism" is a bit of a nonsense, but judges who embrace it have higher utility because their judgements are more likely to be respected and accepted. The reason I haven't written it is because I've kinda written it already[1] and I can't think of a better way to explain what I'm trying to convey. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with being caught between the essential unknowability of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
  - confluence 14y ago
    Not really. I'm talking to you because I'm a middle-class male, who studies technology/science in the year 2013. That's pretty lucky. Does that make want to give up - throw my hands up in the air and say - What will be will be? Hell no. I merely appreciate the gifts I've been given. I try not to attribute any success to my own hard work and study, and I try to do the best with what I have got. Knowing that my existence is particularly random/arbitrary doesn't really change what I do. It merely changes how I see the world around me. Same way I view the universe really. Its existence is fairly random. There really isn't really any point to it. It'll eventually die, and so will everyone else I know. Does that make me say - What's the point - nothing matters? Not really. It makes me cherish everything I've been given (life/liberty/health), it emboldens me to enjoy the little life that I have been given. Life is pretty amazing. It's also pretty random. I revel in the arbitrariness of it all while I can.
jacoblyles 14y ago
Life's course can be explained by agency and environment. We all know environment, including luck, is important. But what motivates people to write agency out of the picture? Agency is what makes us distinctly human. Perhaps by belittling agency, people feel better about their own disappointments?
- confluence 14y ago
  Here's why environment is important. Random man from environment picks up gun and shoots you point blank without warning. Agency your way out of that little pickle. Or how about - you're a black woman in the year 1900. I'm sorry did you have a future? The amount of things I can list here are endless. You might even be 1 in a million. Too bad there are 1000s of other just like you. You are the least important factor in your success.
  - jacoblyles 14y ago
    I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life. Myself, I come from a poor rural area that many people of my peer group did not escape. I'm proud of my life today, though it is not perfect. I can say it was damned hard to get here and I am happy to be here. What role did agency play in separating my more successful peers from the ones at home in their parents' trailers with no meaningful occupation, often accompanied by unplanned children and drug problems? I think it is greater than 0%. I honestly believe that you have to be born into privilege to believe something like "You are the least important factor in your success". I cannot believe it after seeing what I have seen. Moreover, when privileged people tell the world that success is all luck, I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect. You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". I tell them "Fight harder! You'll make it! Keep trying!". Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it. But if they fail, they'll fail with dignity and self-respect. That's worth something.
    - confluence 14y ago
      Are you male, white and born in America? Sounds pretty lucky to me. But then again - you probably can't see past your own ego (fundamental attribution error FTW). Let's see you fight your way out of being an AIDS infected baby born somewhere in Sudan. > I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life Similar backgrounds. Different outcomes. Take the delta - you get luck. > I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect Ah yes - attributing success to oneself is soooo much healthier. > You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". Straw man. Never said that. Only indicated that your success is dictated to you by both your environment and your DNA. > Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it s/some/most/g > privileged people tell the world that success is all luck You are privileged - but you obviously can't see that (how many people have access to safe water again?). It's to your own benefit that you attribute success to yourself.
jwillgoesfast 14y ago
I'm currently reading Warren Buffet's biography, Snowball. A lot of it has taken me by surprised. My long standing idea of Buffett was that he was careful and prudent, but I'm surprised to learn how highly intellegent he was. the book references how easy school/college was and that he was the only one to get an A+ in Ben Graham's class. It was also very interesting at how OBSESSED he was with earning money, from a very young age, all his efforts revolved around how he could earn more and more money. All that to say, there were a lot of serendipitous aspects to buffet's success, but I think more so he was just an extremely unique individual able to combine 1. very smart 2. very ambitious 3. very concerned with increasing his capitol.
- benched 14y ago
  I agree with the view of Buffet as extraordinarily intelligent. If you generalize intelligence to the ability to mentally model and make good predictions about dynamic systems (such as companies and markets in this case), and recognize that humans have a great variance in the types and degrees of expression of such ability, it makes sense that there would be a handful of people who can almost literally see the future, from the point of view of the rest of us with less insight.
- confluence 14y ago
  > "I've had all this good fortune," Buffett says. "It starts with being born in this country, though. It starts with being born male in 1930." Source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2104309,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2104309,00.html I'm sure there were plenty of intelligent women out there who are just as intelligent, just as smart and just as hard working as Buffett but who never got their own shot. Buffett may be good. But so are many other people.
- geezer 14y ago
  As were many others who weren't as lucky as Buffett
jacques_chester 14y ago
Luck matters. It has always mattered. http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/ http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/ Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life. Before this discussion gets too far down the usual track, it's useful to remember the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes. Is luck necessary for success? At the super-high level, yes. In fact at the low level, yes. Being born in the USA or the anglosphere or in a wealthy country is a massive stroke of luck. Is luck sufficient for success? No. Ask any lottery winner. Now to all the other things people list -- intelligence, personality and the like. Is an anxious drive to achieve necessary? At that level, it would seem so. Is it sufficient? No. It's not; no matter how ambitious you are it's going to be difficult to transcend some starting conditions.
- benched 14y ago
  Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. There are so many types of walks of life experienced by tens of millions in the USA that consist of suffering unimaginable to a person doing well. Poverty here is especially harsh because, spatially, you're so close to those occupying privileged positions and living their dreams, that it always seems as if it could be you, and it seems that way to those on both sides of the divide.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    > Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. I suspect that US-born tech entrepreneur "successes" would come close to outnumbering all other countries of origin put together. And being poor in the USA is still streets ahead of poverty in almost every country on earth. In the USA it often means an unpleasant life. Elsewhere it frequently means you die as an infant. It's pretty hard to become a tech CEO at 20 if you died when you were 5.
    - chii 14y ago
      I think the parent post meant that the relative difference in wealth is way more apparent in the US (vs in a third world country where all your neighbours are poor like you would be). But yes, in absolute terms, i would rather the sort of poverty in the US than the sort of famine in parts of africa.
thewarrior 14y ago
Whenever these kinds of discussions come up on HN , I notice two cognitive biases which always end up derailing the discussion . One is where people think that they're infact quite talented and deserving of success its just that their luck wasn't favorable . The other group is people who've worked their way out of pretty difficult circumstances and find explaining away everything as luck unacceptable at some level . This makes people want to believe in a certain position and triggers long arguments . Its a similar thing to the nature nurture debates that happen frequently on HN . Let me give you guys an example . One day a friend told me that theres a really cool site called Hacker News which I should check out . I initially didnt understand most of the stuff people here were talking about but suffice to say that its changing my outlook on things . So maybe just maybe if I ever make it big wouldnt this count as luck ? Another thing being that I have an interest in music . But when I was young I just never got around to learning the fundamentals . I'm teaching myself now but if someone musically knowledgeable was around me when I was young I'm quite sure I would be quite deeply into music by now . Let me go deeper . Why this interest in music ? I had a small keyboard I always used to play with . What if it wasnt there ? Then later on more recently I saw someone play live which rekindled my interest and started me learning . If I hadnt seen that maybe I wouldnt be so interested . So yeah luck pretty much nudges us down different streams . But your swimming ability matters too ... Life being an infinite graph search over an almost infinite search space of possibilities a randomised algorithm seems to be what nature prefers . Thats how evolution works by using luck to its advantage . The ultimate lucky stroke could be , that evolution gave rise to our species in the first place but then you could say that the rabbit hole goes far deeper ....
poorwhitemale 14y ago
"... said all multimillionaire white men." Closed the window. Grow up.
31reasons 14y ago
Luck matters for people who are obsessed with Success. If you are working on things that you absolutely love, would you care about luck that much ? If you already have favorable circumstances like having a healthy brain and living in a developed society you can count on hardwork to make you a millionaire. But No one owes you Billion Dollars no matter what you do in your life. Nature is not designed to optimize your work/luck balance. Out of trillions of cells in a human body few cells gets lucky once in a while to massively grow and cause tumors. Its not a normal course for a cell to cause cancer and thats why its called an anomaly. Same goes for people in the society.
breck 14y ago
Every single successful person had many near death experiences, and there are many alternate universes where they aren't well known, and in fact the famous names in those universes are ones we don't know about in ours. The folks we look up to as "successful" in our observable universe are generally folks who: 1. Won the Ovarian Lottery. 2. Used their time well. 3. Didn't quit. 4. Didn't get killed for a long enough period of time to achieve accomplishments greater than most people. Success is not accidental. Sure, you need #1 + #4, but you also need #2 + #3.
- goldfeld 14y ago
  That seems to suggest successful people run greater risks of dying than the average. I don't think that would hold to a statistical analysis, perhaps it would even show the opposite trend (poor people die more often). If it were true, we'd see a lot more famous people being murdered or dying from stress or disease or something similar, as opposed to just now and then managing to kill themselves with drugs and other things of their own undoing.
talkingquickly 14y ago
I'd strongly recommend the book Fooled by Randomness (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Markets/dp/0141031484 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Mark...) for a very entertaining look at the role of chance both in "success" in the financial markets and life in general. One of the few books I can honestly say had a significant impact on how I approach a lot of every day situations.
n3rdy 14y ago
I disagree that luck has anything to do with success. People get lucky all the time and do nothing with it. How many people win the lottery only to go broke? When that happens nobody bats an eyelash, but if someone uses those lottery winnings to start a successful company, it was 1,000,000% the lotteries fault for this persons success, not their initiative. No doubt some people are lucky and have an easier time than others, but opportunity is such a small part of the equation. People in the U.S will literally get dozens of opportunities a year to become successful, but they're not paying attention and never even notice them, and they will continue griping about how unfair their life is. It is the tenacity someone has to build something from nothing, and their ability to do that over again if everything falls apart, that sets one apart from the unsuccessful. While everyone else is obsessively pursuing escapism through television, gossip, or substance, a successful person is obsessively pursuing the steps they need to take to alter their own reality to something better. The luck argument in my opinion is ignorant because the type of person who strives to be successful doesn't want anything handed to them, they understand that dependence is born out of things coming too easily, so they reject it. The type of person who waits for luck to strike, is doomed to either disappointment or dependence. They will never feel that same confidence and security a success minded person feels, because even with wealth, their focus will be on not losing that wealth. Someone who built their own success is confident in their ability to start over.
- brazzy 14y ago
  Well, you're wrong. Luck is a big factor in exceptional successes. As the article says: it's not sufficient. It's not necessary to be moderately successful. But no matter how tenacious and "success minded" you are, without a stroke of luck your success will be pretty limited. When someone uses lottery winnings to start a successful company, do you really think they would have gotten "dozens of opportunities each year" to invest a large amount of money however they want? It's of course a very attractive delusion to claim that luck has no part in success. To the successful person it increases their personal sense of achievement, and to the one hoping to be successful it makes big successes appear more achievable. Especially if you add the idea that it's not about talent/intelligence either but only about mindset. But it's still a delusion.
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
I agree with most all of this. The author only gets in trouble towards the end (when he's making his point, unfortunately) "...In my perfect world, this reflection would lead these people to use their power to make similar levels of luck more likely for a wider variety of people. Given the chance, I bet their skills can take them from there..." The story he left out was the one that needs to be told more: the guy who kept failing and failing until one day he was a huge success. To hear Madigral tell it, the onus is on the successful to make similar levels of luck more likely for folks. The problem is manyfold. One, aspects of success is rarely predetermined. You don't know where it's going to happen. So where would you assist? Two, because there are way more failures than successes, the goal here is to create people who will "happily fail" -- trying as hard as they can, learning some good lessons, then moving on. This ability is an internal attribute. You can't make somebody have it. Finally, he has the model all wrong. Very rarely in these stories does some outsider come in and decide to make life better for somebody just because of his good graces. Much more likely, hard-working and resilient founders run into people who are more than happy to use them for their own purposes -- which also helps the founders along. Yes, absolutely, it's luck. But its a special kind of luck. It's not chance. This isn't winning the lottery. It's 99% what's going on inside the head of the person combined with playing a game with 1-in-20 odds. The minute you start externalizing all of that -- saying that an external agent can directly and purposefully "make" somebody lucky? The train has left the rails. Your model is all wrong. The reason the multiple failure story needs to be told more is that no matter how you jigger the external setup, you're never sure you're headed in the right direction. So keeping trying, pivoting, and so forth are much more indicative of success than some kind of environmental issue. Successful people do it from anywhere. Might take them 40 years, but they don't stop. They just keep playing the game. That's as big of a success factor as luck. If the odds are 1-in-20, and it takes 2 years to fail? Looks like you've got 40 years of work. Most all of us can't handle that, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible, either. You can manage your luck. We can't change the "variety of people" that are successful by external factors. You can't engineer market efficiency by fiat. If you could, you could just skip all that messy hard work and chance stuff and just hand out some nebulous thing called "opportunity" to folks. Doesn't work that way. Can't do outcome-based entrepreneurial configuration, as much as many really smart and really rich people would like to try.
norswap 14y ago
Success might be accidental. But I agree with the sentiment that if you keep trying (and are dedicated, smart, etc), you'll reach success. In that sense, it isn't accidental. But what is I think linked to luck is the magnitude of your success.
LatvjuAvs 14y ago
Disconnected you are. Labeling you do not know and pretending you know. Still, belief is lagging behind and dismissed, baffled where you are.

93 points by hudibras 14y ago

Good article, reminds me of The Myth of the Garage essay by the Heath bros [1]. And the unforgettable high-school slogan "luck (or success) is where preparation meets opportunity." You don't always control the opportunities. [1] http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/ http://www.heathbrothers.com/the-myth-of-the-garage/ edit: misquoted the unforgettable

orangethirty 14y ago
You don't always control the opportunities. But you can sure show up where they serve them.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Except for when they show up at all-white country clubs.
- md224 14y ago
  That's true, but (and I may be misreading it here) I feel like the piece speaks to an even deeper element of chance: the chance that you even find your true passion to begin with. If you're in love with a discipline and know you want to excel in it, then you're lucky to have solidified a purpose in your life. Some people take years, decades, maybe their entire lives to discover what it is that truly makes them tick. I'm sure some never do.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Do know that a lot of people are just too afraid to even try. Society has put them down so much that they cannot fathom standing up for themselves. Its really sad. Many talented people waste away due to how we decide to run things. Still, survival of the fittest applies here too. If you cannot make your own luck then bad luck. Someone else will.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      Being someone who has always just jumped in and tried whatever I found interesting, it really is amazing see how immobile people often feel. I've had discussions with several people who believe that they cannot try anything without the backing of an educational institution, of which they often do not have time/money available to explore that option, leaving them doing nothing at all.
jwillgoesfast 14y ago
I love that quote and the idea behind it. Hard to implement, but good to keep in mind.

aik 14y ago

This reminds me of Peter Thiel's lecture on the question of luck.[1] A focus and care for topics like what this article discusses often falls into the optimistic indeterminism quadrant that he outlines -- ie. we're optimistic about a future that we find largely out of our control, ie. is approaching fairly randomly but we feel good about it. The worry he outlines is that we may be at risk of falling into "pessimistic indeterminism", where Japan has existed for some time and much of Europe, ie. we don't feel good about a future we can't control. I agree that yes many things are indeterminate, and perhaps I can use this knowledge and attempt to take actions to mitigate the bad-unknowns, and not get too angry if things don't always work out, however beyond this what are the lessons to be learned here? I always fear that confirmation bias will take root and a common reaction to articles like this become, "oh, they were just lucky, so my current course [probably of inaction] could also lead to similar success given random chance..." No, that's not what it's saying. Perhaps I'm a deterministic pessimist? [1] http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-13-notes-essay http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...

klochner 14y ago

Given that most people working tech in the valley haven't hit a lot of significant roadblocks, this is a great parable for HN to find compassion - we too often write off the less fortunate as merely less talented or hard working.

frogpelt 14y ago
The danger comes when, by emphasizing the fortune in the equation, we cause the "less fortunate" to stop trying. Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow.
- confluence 14y ago
  > Time and chance happen to all people. But people also reap what they sow. The above statement is logically inconsistent.
  - stan_rogers 14y ago
    No, it isn't, unless you are assuming only circumstance or only "karma" can affect one's path in life. Nothing of the sort was either stated or implied.

alaskamiller 14y ago

That first mil seems to be all work. Then all the millions thereafter seems to be all luck. Or is it the other way around...

orangethirty 14y ago
For me it was the first thousand. For some reason I was blocking myself from making more than that. But now, well, I am not blocked anymore. :)

confluence 14y ago

A similar article was discussed yesterday on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174334 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5174334 (some good comments there for people who missed it ): My opinion is that success is always accidental. You are the product of your DNA and your environment. There are no great men. Only great situations (see multiple origin of inventions/scientific progress/businesses). Life's a crapshoot. It's all luck.

jacques_chester 14y ago
One important stroke of luck is to believe that it's not luck. I've been gestating an essay about "useful lies" for a while now. Some things that we know aren't truly true are embraced as if they are true because of the utility of doing so. So for example, believing that success is not related to luck. It's untrue, in my estimation. But if you truly accept it you wind up with silly notions like Insha'Allah and nothing much gets achieved. Or take realism/legalism in law. Sure, judges are biased, judges affect policy yadda yadda. But actually embracing that reality makes the legal system work less well. Meanwhile, "strict and complete legalism" is a bit of a nonsense, but judges who embrace it have higher utility because their judgements are more likely to be respected and accepted. The reason I haven't written it is because I've kinda written it already[1] and I can't think of a better way to explain what I'm trying to convey. I'm also deeply uncomfortable with being caught between the essential unknowability of complex systems and wanting all events and system configurations to be explicable. Reading Hayek after Dekker has been a very unhappy experience for me. [1] http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/ http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/
- confluence 14y ago
  Not really. I'm talking to you because I'm a middle-class male, who studies technology/science in the year 2013. That's pretty lucky. Does that make want to give up - throw my hands up in the air and say - What will be will be? Hell no. I merely appreciate the gifts I've been given. I try not to attribute any success to my own hard work and study, and I try to do the best with what I have got. Knowing that my existence is particularly random/arbitrary doesn't really change what I do. It merely changes how I see the world around me. Same way I view the universe really. Its existence is fairly random. There really isn't really any point to it. It'll eventually die, and so will everyone else I know. Does that make me say - What's the point - nothing matters? Not really. It makes me cherish everything I've been given (life/liberty/health), it emboldens me to enjoy the little life that I have been given. Life is pretty amazing. It's also pretty random. I revel in the arbitrariness of it all while I can.

jacoblyles 14y ago

Life's course can be explained by agency and environment. We all know environment, including luck, is important. But what motivates people to write agency out of the picture? Agency is what makes us distinctly human. Perhaps by belittling agency, people feel better about their own disappointments?

confluence 14y ago
Here's why environment is important. Random man from environment picks up gun and shoots you point blank without warning. Agency your way out of that little pickle. Or how about - you're a black woman in the year 1900. I'm sorry did you have a future? The amount of things I can list here are endless. You might even be 1 in a million. Too bad there are 1000s of other just like you. You are the least important factor in your success.
- jacoblyles 14y ago
  I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life. Myself, I come from a poor rural area that many people of my peer group did not escape. I'm proud of my life today, though it is not perfect. I can say it was damned hard to get here and I am happy to be here. What role did agency play in separating my more successful peers from the ones at home in their parents' trailers with no meaningful occupation, often accompanied by unplanned children and drug problems? I think it is greater than 0%. I honestly believe that you have to be born into privilege to believe something like "You are the least important factor in your success". I cannot believe it after seeing what I have seen. Moreover, when privileged people tell the world that success is all luck, I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect. You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". I tell them "Fight harder! You'll make it! Keep trying!". Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it. But if they fail, they'll fail with dignity and self-respect. That's worth something.
  - confluence 14y ago
    Are you male, white and born in America? Sounds pretty lucky to me. But then again - you probably can't see past your own ego (fundamental attribution error FTW). Let's see you fight your way out of being an AIDS infected baby born somewhere in Sudan. > I see people from similar backgrounds achieving very different outcomes in life Similar backgrounds. Different outcomes. Take the delta - you get luck. > I fear that it has a poisonous cultural effect Ah yes - attributing success to oneself is soooo much healthier. > You are telling all the would-be strivers in the world "Give up. You lost the lottery at birth. What will happen will happen". Straw man. Never said that. Only indicated that your success is dictated to you by both your environment and your DNA. > Yes, the reality is that some of them will never make it s/some/most/g > privileged people tell the world that success is all luck You are privileged - but you obviously can't see that (how many people have access to safe water again?). It's to your own benefit that you attribute success to yourself.

jwillgoesfast 14y ago

I'm currently reading Warren Buffet's biography, Snowball. A lot of it has taken me by surprised. My long standing idea of Buffett was that he was careful and prudent, but I'm surprised to learn how highly intellegent he was. the book references how easy school/college was and that he was the only one to get an A+ in Ben Graham's class. It was also very interesting at how OBSESSED he was with earning money, from a very young age, all his efforts revolved around how he could earn more and more money. All that to say, there were a lot of serendipitous aspects to buffet's success, but I think more so he was just an extremely unique individual able to combine 1. very smart 2. very ambitious 3. very concerned with increasing his capitol.

benched 14y ago
I agree with the view of Buffet as extraordinarily intelligent. If you generalize intelligence to the ability to mentally model and make good predictions about dynamic systems (such as companies and markets in this case), and recognize that humans have a great variance in the types and degrees of expression of such ability, it makes sense that there would be a handful of people who can almost literally see the future, from the point of view of the rest of us with less insight.
confluence 14y ago
> "I've had all this good fortune," Buffett says. "It starts with being born in this country, though. It starts with being born male in 1930." Source: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2104309,00.html http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,2104309,00.html I'm sure there were plenty of intelligent women out there who are just as intelligent, just as smart and just as hard working as Buffett but who never got their own shot. Buffett may be good. But so are many other people.
geezer 14y ago
As were many others who weren't as lucky as Buffett

jacques_chester 14y ago

Luck matters. It has always mattered. http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/ http://chester.id.au/2012/03/02/does-leadership-matter/ Of course, you can't control it. At best you can optimise based on the cards you're dealt in life. Before this discussion gets too far down the usual track, it's useful to remember the distinction between necessary and sufficient causes. Is luck necessary for success? At the super-high level, yes. In fact at the low level, yes. Being born in the USA or the anglosphere or in a wealthy country is a massive stroke of luck. Is luck sufficient for success? No. Ask any lottery winner. Now to all the other things people list -- intelligence, personality and the like. Is an anxious drive to achieve necessary? At that level, it would seem so. Is it sufficient? No. It's not; no matter how ambitious you are it's going to be difficult to transcend some starting conditions.

benched 14y ago
Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. There are so many types of walks of life experienced by tens of millions in the USA that consist of suffering unimaginable to a person doing well. Poverty here is especially harsh because, spatially, you're so close to those occupying privileged positions and living their dreams, that it always seems as if it could be you, and it seems that way to those on both sides of the divide.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  > Being born in the USA is only a stroke of luck after the fact of achieving a measure of success. I suspect that US-born tech entrepreneur "successes" would come close to outnumbering all other countries of origin put together. And being poor in the USA is still streets ahead of poverty in almost every country on earth. In the USA it often means an unpleasant life. Elsewhere it frequently means you die as an infant. It's pretty hard to become a tech CEO at 20 if you died when you were 5.
  - chii 14y ago
    I think the parent post meant that the relative difference in wealth is way more apparent in the US (vs in a third world country where all your neighbours are poor like you would be). But yes, in absolute terms, i would rather the sort of poverty in the US than the sort of famine in parts of africa.

thewarrior 14y ago

Whenever these kinds of discussions come up on HN , I notice two cognitive biases which always end up derailing the discussion . One is where people think that they're infact quite talented and deserving of success its just that their luck wasn't favorable . The other group is people who've worked their way out of pretty difficult circumstances and find explaining away everything as luck unacceptable at some level . This makes people want to believe in a certain position and triggers long arguments . Its a similar thing to the nature nurture debates that happen frequently on HN . Let me give you guys an example . One day a friend told me that theres a really cool site called Hacker News which I should check out . I initially didnt understand most of the stuff people here were talking about but suffice to say that its changing my outlook on things . So maybe just maybe if I ever make it big wouldnt this count as luck ? Another thing being that I have an interest in music . But when I was young I just never got around to learning the fundamentals . I'm teaching myself now but if someone musically knowledgeable was around me when I was young I'm quite sure I would be quite deeply into music by now . Let me go deeper . Why this interest in music ? I had a small keyboard I always used to play with . What if it wasnt there ? Then later on more recently I saw someone play live which rekindled my interest and started me learning . If I hadnt seen that maybe I wouldnt be so interested . So yeah luck pretty much nudges us down different streams . But your swimming ability matters too ... Life being an infinite graph search over an almost infinite search space of possibilities a randomised algorithm seems to be what nature prefers . Thats how evolution works by using luck to its advantage . The ultimate lucky stroke could be , that evolution gave rise to our species in the first place but then you could say that the rabbit hole goes far deeper ....

poorwhitemale 14y ago

"... said all multimillionaire white men." Closed the window. Grow up.

31reasons 14y ago

Luck matters for people who are obsessed with Success. If you are working on things that you absolutely love, would you care about luck that much ? If you already have favorable circumstances like having a healthy brain and living in a developed society you can count on hardwork to make you a millionaire. But No one owes you Billion Dollars no matter what you do in your life. Nature is not designed to optimize your work/luck balance. Out of trillions of cells in a human body few cells gets lucky once in a while to massively grow and cause tumors. Its not a normal course for a cell to cause cancer and thats why its called an anomaly. Same goes for people in the society.

breck 14y ago

Every single successful person had many near death experiences, and there are many alternate universes where they aren't well known, and in fact the famous names in those universes are ones we don't know about in ours. The folks we look up to as "successful" in our observable universe are generally folks who: 1. Won the Ovarian Lottery. 2. Used their time well. 3. Didn't quit. 4. Didn't get killed for a long enough period of time to achieve accomplishments greater than most people. Success is not accidental. Sure, you need #1 + #4, but you also need #2 + #3.

goldfeld 14y ago
That seems to suggest successful people run greater risks of dying than the average. I don't think that would hold to a statistical analysis, perhaps it would even show the opposite trend (poor people die more often). If it were true, we'd see a lot more famous people being murdered or dying from stress or disease or something similar, as opposed to just now and then managing to kill themselves with drugs and other things of their own undoing.

talkingquickly 14y ago

I'd strongly recommend the book Fooled by Randomness (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Markets/dp/0141031484 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Mark...) for a very entertaining look at the role of chance both in "success" in the financial markets and life in general. One of the few books I can honestly say had a significant impact on how I approach a lot of every day situations.

n3rdy 14y ago

I disagree that luck has anything to do with success. People get lucky all the time and do nothing with it. How many people win the lottery only to go broke? When that happens nobody bats an eyelash, but if someone uses those lottery winnings to start a successful company, it was 1,000,000% the lotteries fault for this persons success, not their initiative. No doubt some people are lucky and have an easier time than others, but opportunity is such a small part of the equation. People in the U.S will literally get dozens of opportunities a year to become successful, but they're not paying attention and never even notice them, and they will continue griping about how unfair their life is. It is the tenacity someone has to build something from nothing, and their ability to do that over again if everything falls apart, that sets one apart from the unsuccessful. While everyone else is obsessively pursuing escapism through television, gossip, or substance, a successful person is obsessively pursuing the steps they need to take to alter their own reality to something better. The luck argument in my opinion is ignorant because the type of person who strives to be successful doesn't want anything handed to them, they understand that dependence is born out of things coming too easily, so they reject it. The type of person who waits for luck to strike, is doomed to either disappointment or dependence. They will never feel that same confidence and security a success minded person feels, because even with wealth, their focus will be on not losing that wealth. Someone who built their own success is confident in their ability to start over.

brazzy 14y ago
Well, you're wrong. Luck is a big factor in exceptional successes. As the article says: it's not sufficient. It's not necessary to be moderately successful. But no matter how tenacious and "success minded" you are, without a stroke of luck your success will be pretty limited. When someone uses lottery winnings to start a successful company, do you really think they would have gotten "dozens of opportunities each year" to invest a large amount of money however they want? It's of course a very attractive delusion to claim that luck has no part in success. To the successful person it increases their personal sense of achievement, and to the one hoping to be successful it makes big successes appear more achievable. Especially if you add the idea that it's not about talent/intelligence either but only about mindset. But it's still a delusion.

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

I agree with most all of this. The author only gets in trouble towards the end (when he's making his point, unfortunately) "...In my perfect world, this reflection would lead these people to use their power to make similar levels of luck more likely for a wider variety of people. Given the chance, I bet their skills can take them from there..." The story he left out was the one that needs to be told more: the guy who kept failing and failing until one day he was a huge success. To hear Madigral tell it, the onus is on the successful to make similar levels of luck more likely for folks. The problem is manyfold. One, aspects of success is rarely predetermined. You don't know where it's going to happen. So where would you assist? Two, because there are way more failures than successes, the goal here is to create people who will "happily fail" -- trying as hard as they can, learning some good lessons, then moving on. This ability is an internal attribute. You can't make somebody have it. Finally, he has the model all wrong. Very rarely in these stories does some outsider come in and decide to make life better for somebody just because of his good graces. Much more likely, hard-working and resilient founders run into people who are more than happy to use them for their own purposes -- which also helps the founders along. Yes, absolutely, it's luck. But its a special kind of luck. It's not chance. This isn't winning the lottery. It's 99% what's going on inside the head of the person combined with playing a game with 1-in-20 odds. The minute you start externalizing all of that -- saying that an external agent can directly and purposefully "make" somebody lucky? The train has left the rails. Your model is all wrong. The reason the multiple failure story needs to be told more is that no matter how you jigger the external setup, you're never sure you're headed in the right direction. So keeping trying, pivoting, and so forth are much more indicative of success than some kind of environmental issue. Successful people do it from anywhere. Might take them 40 years, but they don't stop. They just keep playing the game. That's as big of a success factor as luck. If the odds are 1-in-20, and it takes 2 years to fail? Looks like you've got 40 years of work. Most all of us can't handle that, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible, either. You can manage your luck. We can't change the "variety of people" that are successful by external factors. You can't engineer market efficiency by fiat. If you could, you could just skip all that messy hard work and chance stuff and just hand out some nebulous thing called "opportunity" to folks. Doesn't work that way. Can't do outcome-based entrepreneurial configuration, as much as many really smart and really rich people would like to try.

norswap 14y ago

Success might be accidental. But I agree with the sentiment that if you keep trying (and are dedicated, smart, etc), you'll reach success. In that sense, it isn't accidental. But what is I think linked to luck is the magnitude of your success.

LatvjuAvs 14y ago

Disconnected you are. Labeling you do not know and pretending you know. Still, belief is lagging behind and dismissed, baffled where you are.