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I'm genuinely curious as to why people believe that it is 100% up to "luck" that some people are successful and others are not. If it was "luck", wouldn't CEOs

I'm genuinely curious as to why people believe that it is 100% up to "luck" that some people are successful and others are not. If it was "luck", wouldn't CEOs be evenly distributed amongst minorities, men, and women? Or at least per the population distribution? Or are white males just that much more "lucky" than women and minorities? If you think answering those questions is tough, you and I are on the same page--that's why I don't ascribe this to "luck."

ThomPete 13y ago
It's luck because plenty of people do exactly the same thing as you and me. Work hard, take what they can get, have ambition and yet still don't make it. If you want to see this in it's purest form look at music and art. Plenty of amazing hardworking musicians that will never make a dime. Plenty of hacks who will.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
  Why do people always reference hard work? Ditch diggers work hard. Migrant farm laborers work hard. So what?
  - cmiles74 13y ago
    Hard work should have value and should be rewarded with a wage that one can live on. While the person in this article is living, they are still not earning enough to support themselves and their family without supplementing from a food pantry. Because this is a contract position they are not allowed to work more than thirty hours a week. I would argue that this shows that this is not a living wage.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      And the person featured in this article is not living?
    - thatswrong0 13y ago
      > Hard work should have value No it shouldn't, at least not because the work is hard. I could spend 16 hours a day 7 days a week digging holes in the Sahara desert which are of no use to anybody. I would be working incredibly hard, but I would be producing no value, so I do not see why I should be rewarded anything. I only will and should be 'rewarded', in the sense that someone else is willing to pay me for my work, if my labor produces something of value for someone else.
    - jedmeyers 13y ago
      What should have value is how much "service" you render to other people. It should not matter whether providing this service comes hard to you or not - it's all up to you.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - chinasmith 13y ago
    Ditches need to be digged. Farms need to be tended to. People need to eat. The laborers should be paid for the value of the work instead of receiving the slimmest of margins from the fruit of their labor.
  - laudenum 13y ago
    Ditches need to be dug. Farms need to be tended to. People need to eat. The laborers should be paid for the value of the work instead of receiving the slimmest of margins from the fruit of their labor.
  - ThomPete 13y ago
    Because the argument often is that those who make the most worked harder than anyone else. My point is that most people work hard so it's not by any metrics and explanation for why some people do really well and others don't. The name of the University you go to however. Now that matters a lot.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      >Because the argument often is that those who make the most worked harder than anyone else. I don't think that I've ever heard that argument made in my life.
      - ThomPete 13y ago
        Then you haven't been listening.
        alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        [citation needed]
        ThomPete 13y ago
        You want me to find citations for other peoples claims about hard work as a reason why some people make it and other don't? You don't have to believe me, but just because you haven't heard that I am not going to spend time finding citation. But a quick look around this thread should point you in the right direction.
        alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        >You want me to find citations for other peoples claims about hard work as a reason why some people make it and other don't? I want you to find someone who's claimed hard work was the reason for their success.
        13y ago
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
mikeyouse 13y ago
I think you're misunderstanding Stephen's point. He's not saying that all it takes is luck to be successful. I think it was more a comment on the rarity of income mobility from parents to children. Look at the calculator in the middle of this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom... If you look at the median income of a child born in San Jose to parents who were making $20k/year, only 11% of them make it into the top quintile. Only 1/4 of them will make it into the top 40% of the income distribution. This skewed mobility is what people ascribe to 'luck' when people work their way out of poverty. Obviously it's a complex issue that is somewhat trivialized by calling the successful ones 'lucky', but it's a shortcut to describing the rarity of upwards mobility from parents to kids.
cmiles74 13y ago
There are a number of people who are CEO of this-or-that because they are smart, skilled CEOs with the proper credentials. And there are some that lack credentials and make this up by being smarter or better. And some who are pretty dumb and inept but make up for it by having really great credentials. You're comment asks why people believe it's "100% up to 'luck'" and I'd argue that there are few people making that argument. Rather, the argument goes, luck is a component of getting a high-paying CEO salary. I don't think this is in any way arguable. The argument that there's no luck and it's 100% skill on the part of the CEO is equally silly. Even if skill was the largest success predictor, credentials would still need to be evenly distributed throughout the population to achieve your utopian vision.
hbmnn 13y ago
Being born a straight white male with a financially stable family in America is luck.
mrow84 13y ago
What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that? If so, it seems that you are saying that white males just put more effort in than other people. I'm not convinced that that is true. In my opinion, when averaged over the population, a significant component of individual success is "luck", that being the opportunities that are presented to certain individuals, and not to others.
- ericabiz 13y ago
  It starts with a belief that you can be one of those successful people. That you can do this. If you believe you are lucky, you are more lucky. Here's the study behind that (PDF): http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_factor.pdf http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_f... I also believe that, in a similar manner, people who believe they have what it takes to be successful (whatever that is in their minds) are more likely to be successful. I went through most of my teens/20s with pretty bad beliefs about myself. I was a college dropout, a woman in a male-dominated industry, fighting with depression and (then-undiagnosed) ADHD. When the tech industry crashed in 2001-2002 I couldn't even get an interview for a job. I did not believe I could be successful. Slowly, though the years, I started changing those beliefs, and as I did, more opportunities opened up for me. Now, I'm able to mentor others (especially women) who want to get into development. One of the things I always work with people on is believing that they can do it with what they have, that they don't need to be or do something that is "more" in order to be successful. My inner outlook changed my external life. I had to change my beliefs before my external reality changed. Sitting where I was in 1999, I'm not sure I would have believed that--but I do now.
- jeffdavis 13y ago
  "What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that?" There are more inputs than hard work and luck. An obvious example would be the decisions one makes in life. For instance, having a child at 20 years old, outside of a stable relationship has long been known to have different results than having a child at 25 in a stable relationship. Decisions themselves have lots of inputs, so it's a complex issue. For instance, family and culture have a big impact on decisions, so those with different backgrounds would be expected to make different decisions, and therefore have different results. It would be quite a surprise if different families and cultures produced the same results, after all. Note that I'm certainly not saying that cultures are better or worse than other cultures. They may have different measures of success, for one thing; and even on one measure (like financial success) the rankings of various cultures might change radically if the environment changes. I guess you could say that it's "luck" to be born into a family and culture that encourage the kind of decisions that are best for the environment you're in, or something like that. But that just doesn't seem to usefully inform any policy proposal. If bad decisions are a major factor in bad outcomes, it might be more effective to encourage better decisions than to try to deal with the consequences after bad decisions are already made.
redthrowaway 13y ago
Nobody thinks it's 100% up to luck, but luck does play a huge part in it if you call "luck" all those things which are beyond your control and which you can take neither credit nor blame for. The simple fact is that a desire and willingness to succeed is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for success. There are many people who are successful because they were born into the right families and given the right opportunities, and there are many more who struggle all their lives in poverty for lack of same, despite a sincere and demonstrated desire to succeed and more hard work than the vast majority of the people on this site will ever know.
chinasmith 13y ago
Being born a straight white male with a financially stable family in America is luck.
malandrew 13y ago
"Or are white males just that much more "lucky" than women and minorities?" I take exception to this because I have advised a bunch of non-technical people on how to get into coding, probably about a dozen or so. White males simply ask more. That's what "luck" is here. Asking, then doing. Among all those people I've had one black African ask me. I sat down with him for a while giving him tons of advice and corresponded a few times more after that until I got swamped by work. I've had only one woman ask me (recently, just this past week), but only superficially. She had recently picked up a book on generative art because she fancies being able to do that. Ironically, we have the same exact book at the office because I work with one of the best generative artists in the Bay Area, Reza Ali, so I actually had some decent advice on where to start if she was serious. The conversation was shallow and brief before she got into general discussions about life with my girlfriend who was also in the room. It was simply a qualitatively different way of asking for advice which isn't likely to lead to success. Not all women are like this, I know. But I only have on anecdote thus far and I'm disappointed by this. I'd personally love it if more women coded so I could nerd out about programming with both men and women equally. The above are only anecdotal (and the plural of anecdotes is not data). Maybe I only have many more male white friends, but my girlfriend certainly does not and her friends are all aware of what I do for a living and I do have a decent amount of contact with them. Near as I can tell from above, the number of minorities that ask for help is roughly in line with base rates. The number of women who ask is not. Women are roughly 50% of the population. If they want to learn and do this kind of thing, they need to ask and then do. This definition of asking and doing for women is "luck". Woman do not lack contact with people that can help if they just asked. For minorities, it's a bit more sinister in that luck also has an element of propinquity that is far more outside the control of an individual. A minority in a poor neighborhood in the Bay Area is unlikely to come in contact with me or someone like me, so they will never have an opportunity to ask. The guy in this posted article on the other hand does have the luck of propinquity. All he needs to do is walk up to Google employees either before or after his shift and ask a few of them if they are an engineer and if they can offer him advice on how to learn to do what they do. I'd be surprised if he didn't get actionable advice that can get him out of the rut he is in in about 2-3 years.

ThomPete 13y ago

It's luck because plenty of people do exactly the same thing as you and me. Work hard, take what they can get, have ambition and yet still don't make it. If you want to see this in it's purest form look at music and art. Plenty of amazing hardworking musicians that will never make a dime. Plenty of hacks who will.

alexeisadeski3 13y ago
Why do people always reference hard work? Ditch diggers work hard. Migrant farm laborers work hard. So what?
- cmiles74 13y ago
  Hard work should have value and should be rewarded with a wage that one can live on. While the person in this article is living, they are still not earning enough to support themselves and their family without supplementing from a food pantry. Because this is a contract position they are not allowed to work more than thirty hours a week. I would argue that this shows that this is not a living wage.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    And the person featured in this article is not living?
  - thatswrong0 13y ago
    > Hard work should have value No it shouldn't, at least not because the work is hard. I could spend 16 hours a day 7 days a week digging holes in the Sahara desert which are of no use to anybody. I would be working incredibly hard, but I would be producing no value, so I do not see why I should be rewarded anything. I only will and should be 'rewarded', in the sense that someone else is willing to pay me for my work, if my labor produces something of value for someone else.
  - jedmeyers 13y ago
    What should have value is how much "service" you render to other people. It should not matter whether providing this service comes hard to you or not - it's all up to you.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- chinasmith 13y ago
  Ditches need to be digged. Farms need to be tended to. People need to eat. The laborers should be paid for the value of the work instead of receiving the slimmest of margins from the fruit of their labor.
- laudenum 13y ago
  Ditches need to be dug. Farms need to be tended to. People need to eat. The laborers should be paid for the value of the work instead of receiving the slimmest of margins from the fruit of their labor.
- ThomPete 13y ago
  Because the argument often is that those who make the most worked harder than anyone else. My point is that most people work hard so it's not by any metrics and explanation for why some people do really well and others don't. The name of the University you go to however. Now that matters a lot.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    >Because the argument often is that those who make the most worked harder than anyone else. I don't think that I've ever heard that argument made in my life.
    - ThomPete 13y ago
      Then you haven't been listening.
      - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        [citation needed]
        ThomPete 13y ago
        You want me to find citations for other peoples claims about hard work as a reason why some people make it and other don't? You don't have to believe me, but just because you haven't heard that I am not going to spend time finding citation. But a quick look around this thread should point you in the right direction.
        alexeisadeski3 13y ago
        >You want me to find citations for other peoples claims about hard work as a reason why some people make it and other don't? I want you to find someone who's claimed hard work was the reason for their success.
        13y ago
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

mikeyouse 13y ago

I think you're misunderstanding Stephen's point. He's not saying that all it takes is luck to be successful. I think it was more a comment on the rarity of income mobility from parents to children. Look at the calculator in the middle of this NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-incom... If you look at the median income of a child born in San Jose to parents who were making $20k/year, only 11% of them make it into the top quintile. Only 1/4 of them will make it into the top 40% of the income distribution. This skewed mobility is what people ascribe to 'luck' when people work their way out of poverty. Obviously it's a complex issue that is somewhat trivialized by calling the successful ones 'lucky', but it's a shortcut to describing the rarity of upwards mobility from parents to kids.

cmiles74 13y ago

There are a number of people who are CEO of this-or-that because they are smart, skilled CEOs with the proper credentials. And there are some that lack credentials and make this up by being smarter or better. And some who are pretty dumb and inept but make up for it by having really great credentials. You're comment asks why people believe it's "100% up to 'luck'" and I'd argue that there are few people making that argument. Rather, the argument goes, luck is a component of getting a high-paying CEO salary. I don't think this is in any way arguable. The argument that there's no luck and it's 100% skill on the part of the CEO is equally silly. Even if skill was the largest success predictor, credentials would still need to be evenly distributed throughout the population to achieve your utopian vision.

hbmnn 13y ago

Being born a straight white male with a financially stable family in America is luck.

mrow84 13y ago

What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that? If so, it seems that you are saying that white males just put more effort in than other people. I'm not convinced that that is true. In my opinion, when averaged over the population, a significant component of individual success is "luck", that being the opportunities that are presented to certain individuals, and not to others.

ericabiz 13y ago
It starts with a belief that you can be one of those successful people. That you can do this. If you believe you are lucky, you are more lucky. Here's the study behind that (PDF): http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_factor.pdf http://richardwiseman.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the_luck_f... I also believe that, in a similar manner, people who believe they have what it takes to be successful (whatever that is in their minds) are more likely to be successful. I went through most of my teens/20s with pretty bad beliefs about myself. I was a college dropout, a woman in a male-dominated industry, fighting with depression and (then-undiagnosed) ADHD. When the tech industry crashed in 2001-2002 I couldn't even get an interview for a job. I did not believe I could be successful. Slowly, though the years, I started changing those beliefs, and as I did, more opportunities opened up for me. Now, I'm able to mentor others (especially women) who want to get into development. One of the things I always work with people on is believing that they can do it with what they have, that they don't need to be or do something that is "more" in order to be successful. My inner outlook changed my external life. I had to change my beliefs before my external reality changed. Sitting where I was in 1999, I'm not sure I would have believed that--but I do now.
jeffdavis 13y ago
"What is the converse to "luck" in your argument? Is it effort, or work, or something like that?" There are more inputs than hard work and luck. An obvious example would be the decisions one makes in life. For instance, having a child at 20 years old, outside of a stable relationship has long been known to have different results than having a child at 25 in a stable relationship. Decisions themselves have lots of inputs, so it's a complex issue. For instance, family and culture have a big impact on decisions, so those with different backgrounds would be expected to make different decisions, and therefore have different results. It would be quite a surprise if different families and cultures produced the same results, after all. Note that I'm certainly not saying that cultures are better or worse than other cultures. They may have different measures of success, for one thing; and even on one measure (like financial success) the rankings of various cultures might change radically if the environment changes. I guess you could say that it's "luck" to be born into a family and culture that encourage the kind of decisions that are best for the environment you're in, or something like that. But that just doesn't seem to usefully inform any policy proposal. If bad decisions are a major factor in bad outcomes, it might be more effective to encourage better decisions than to try to deal with the consequences after bad decisions are already made.

redthrowaway 13y ago

Nobody thinks it's 100% up to luck, but luck does play a huge part in it if you call "luck" all those things which are beyond your control and which you can take neither credit nor blame for. The simple fact is that a desire and willingness to succeed is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for success. There are many people who are successful because they were born into the right families and given the right opportunities, and there are many more who struggle all their lives in poverty for lack of same, despite a sincere and demonstrated desire to succeed and more hard work than the vast majority of the people on this site will ever know.

chinasmith 13y ago

Being born a straight white male with a financially stable family in America is luck.

malandrew 13y ago

"Or are white males just that much more "lucky" than women and minorities?" I take exception to this because I have advised a bunch of non-technical people on how to get into coding, probably about a dozen or so. White males simply ask more. That's what "luck" is here. Asking, then doing. Among all those people I've had one black African ask me. I sat down with him for a while giving him tons of advice and corresponded a few times more after that until I got swamped by work. I've had only one woman ask me (recently, just this past week), but only superficially. She had recently picked up a book on generative art because she fancies being able to do that. Ironically, we have the same exact book at the office because I work with one of the best generative artists in the Bay Area, Reza Ali, so I actually had some decent advice on where to start if she was serious. The conversation was shallow and brief before she got into general discussions about life with my girlfriend who was also in the room. It was simply a qualitatively different way of asking for advice which isn't likely to lead to success. Not all women are like this, I know. But I only have on anecdote thus far and I'm disappointed by this. I'd personally love it if more women coded so I could nerd out about programming with both men and women equally. The above are only anecdotal (and the plural of anecdotes is not data). Maybe I only have many more male white friends, but my girlfriend certainly does not and her friends are all aware of what I do for a living and I do have a decent amount of contact with them. Near as I can tell from above, the number of minorities that ask for help is roughly in line with base rates. The number of women who ask is not. Women are roughly 50% of the population. If they want to learn and do this kind of thing, they need to ask and then do. This definition of asking and doing for women is "luck". Woman do not lack contact with people that can help if they just asked. For minorities, it's a bit more sinister in that luck also has an element of propinquity that is far more outside the control of an individual. A minority in a poor neighborhood in the Bay Area is unlikely to come in contact with me or someone like me, so they will never have an opportunity to ask. The guy in this posted article on the other hand does have the luck of propinquity. All he needs to do is walk up to Google employees either before or after his shift and ask a few of them if they are an engineer and if they can offer him advice on how to learn to do what they do. I'd be surprised if he didn't get actionable advice that can get him out of the rut he is in in about 2-3 years.