Luck Is a Factor, Not a Verdict
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Treating luck as a reason not to try? That’s procrastination thinking. Luck can still be the largest term in how a life turns out. I’m talking about using that fact as a reason to skip the next useful action.
Luck is clearly involved, but it’s a tautology. The fact that you or I as particular individuals exist at all is phenomenally unlikely. We’re lucky to be alive, but so what? That bit of probability analysis gives no guidance to what our respective best actions are today other than to be grateful for the opportunities that we do have during our brief time on this rock.
Now let’s take our existence as given, cogito ergo sum and all. You and I and everyone around us were born with certain talents, gifts, tendencies, physical or mental attributes, and so on. No, I’m not the fastest sprinter on the planet. You may not be the strongest powerlifter on the planet. Both facts are immaterial: what matters is relative advantage, what you can do better than others nearby.
Luck is neither fate nor destiny. I know, and I’m sure you do too, exceptionally intelligent people — extremely lucky! — who did nothing with it. Maybe they made poor life choices; maybe they just weren’t all that motivated; or maybe they got this counterproductive idea in their heads that because someone, somewhere started with a greater gift, there’s no point in trying at all. Not even being born to wealthy parents sets the path. We all know rags-to-riches stories, but it works in the other direction too. The “Economic Outpatient Care” chapter of The Millionaire Next Door (paid link) by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko gives example after example of parents who had tremendous gifts for accumulating and protecting wealth but were poor at passing those abilities on to their children and enabled their children’s poor behavior. Being born into wealth hurt their kids in multiple ways.
Luck is a factor but not the only one. We are able to overcome both phenomenally good luck and atrociously bad luck. Penn Jillette credited statistician Chip Denman with the wise adage “Luck is probability taken personally.” To overcome a sense that the universe is out to get us, poker pro Mike Caro suggests conducting our lives not as happy or tragic but as interesting — even imagining fascinated entities in the cosmos following your life like a movie, an interesting story.
These are tools for overcoming defeatist thinking. Your starting point does not set your destination. Even if someone was “born on third base,” as the whiny saw goes, that doesn’t take away what you can do from where you are now. Success is not a zero-sum game. I’ll grant that if you’d been born in José Ramírez’s cleats, you would have done better. That counterfactual can be true, and it still doesn’t name today’s action. Fretting over that historical counterfactual is pointless, unproductive worry. It gains you nothing and wastes time you could have invested in yourself, your education, or creating value for others.
Luck is a factor, but don’t presume that we’re all born with a static quantity of luck. By putting ourselves in position to get lucky, we create our own luck. Stoic philosopher Seneca is constantly credited with “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” — verbatim just like that in English; go check. (The attribution is doubtful; the advice is sound.) The preparation piece is the hard work, the education, developing valuable skills, and so on. Opportunity has some luck, yes: connections gained through introductions by one’s parents, mom and dad’s net worth. Opportunity also involves choice. Just show up! While your “luckier” competition is sleeping in or out late partying, your comparative willingness to take productive action gains on them.
“So what?” you ask.
Remember that productive gains compound. As a mathematical illustration — constant growth, no ceiling — one percent better every week over a year makes you two-thirds better than where you started. Over two years, you’re sniffing at three times where you started. Three years is almost five times. Over ten years, you’re 176 times where you started. Arithmetic, not a forecast of income, status, or how happy you are.
The choice is whether to sit around making excuses or get to work. If you’re willing to be consistent, a very slight comparative advantage piles up over long periods of consistency that competitors aren’t willing to match. Let’s up the bar only slightly: five percent better than the competition every week, and in only a year your position improves by a factor of 12. Whoever really coined that line about preparation, people have known for a long time that both luck and hard work are involved. Let’s assume you cannot change your luck at all; even modestly harder work than the rest puts you way ahead. Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (paid link) starts from the same place: be proactive and focus on what you can control.
Now quit doomscrolling and get to work. What are you building? What are your written goals?