Put simply, being in the right place at the right time, and having connections, can be as important as having the skills and experience.
I always tell my kids, you can try your best and still fail. Sometimes you will succeed without any effort at all. Luck will affect the outcome of anything you do.
But you have to be ready for the luck. You have to work hard to be in a position to take advantage. Hard work can mitigate your failures, and any effort you put into doing your best is never wasted because you’re trying to be the best version of yourself.
That’s why you try. Not because you might win and get wealth and fame and glory. You try because you want to be the person who tries.
See also, honesty, kindness, generosity, forgiveness. These are not things we do to be rewarded. The universe (not to mention other people) is going to let you down more often than not. You should still be honest and kind and generous and forgiving and hardworking because that’s the person you want to be.
you can try your best and still fail
One of my favourite Star Trek quotes
I’ve always said personally that to be the very best at something you need 1. Talent, 2. Dedication and 3. Luck. You can still be very close to the best with only two of those things, but if luck is all you have you’re just going to be something like a lottery winner who blows it all in a month. Alternately, if you cultivate a habit of working hard towards your goals, then even in bad situations you’ll be prepared to make the best of it that you possibly can, to get back to a good place faster.
Talent, dedication, and luck. Spot on.
I am very successful in my career and earn more than my school-age self ever expected (tbf, I expected to be a teacher). I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for all three, though.
Lucky points include:
- Being the kid of small business owners who gave me/made me get a job with them at 16.
- Knowing someone at a company who recommended me for an internship.
- Working adjacent to a badass development team that made the best proof of concept to build a new app, so they brought me to their team to support it.
- My Lead retiring so I was able to move to her level after only a couple years.
I wouldn’t have gotten those opportunities if I didn’t also have the dedication and talent, but luck was a huge factor.
I have tried the metaphor that luck opened doors for me, but I had to get to and walk through them. I will never take where I am today for granted.
Those three pillars are my best assessment of how I managed to find myself as the singular best in the world at what I was doing (nothing career worthy, though it did point me in that direction). I was lucky that my parents got me started on it at a very young age, my other hobbies were strongly synergistic meaning I was spending much of my time developing related skills, when I first got into it I just randomly happened to meet up with the group that I reached the top with, so being surrounded by such excellent company had a massive impact. I met so many people who had very strong talent and dedicated themselves, but just never got the breaks I did. But like you said, it was largely because I already had the talent from early childhood learning and had remained dedicated my whole life that I was capable of fitting in when I did meet the right people.
I strongly recommend everyone read Chris Hadfield’s “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth,” as he argues very strongly, with some great anecdotes from his life, for the importance of preparing to receive good luck.
What a great line from TNG!
“Luck favors the prepared!”
- Edna Mode
And guest.
“NO CAPES!”
– Edna Mode
This is my beef with religion. Many seem to push the core idea that you should be honest, kind, generous, and forgiving for the promise of future rewards (heaven, or whatever comparable idea, depending on the belief system) or the prevention of future punishment and suffering (hell, etc), not for the simple pursuit of being a better person or improving the world around you.
That’s a point of view I had never considered before and makes negatice outcome less despairing (? can’t quite find the right word). Thanks a lot!
“Hello, I’m Eddie Murphy and I’m here to tell you the importance of a good education. I’m 20 years old and a high school graduate. I studied at Nassau community college for about two weeks. I have no formal theatrical training whatsoever yet I’m one of the stars of the new Saturday Night Live. I also make more in a week than most white people make in a year. Which leads me to the conclusion that in 1981 a good education is just as important as a warm bucket of hamster vomit. That’s right, all you white kids in school are wasting your sweet precious time because life is luck. You’re either lucky or you’re a bum from the beginning. So stop kidding yourself, drop out. Go have some fun, drink some beer. Get each other pregnant and play Space Invaders. You know, you white kids take life so seriously. Quit school and be successful like me.”
Sammy: Excuse me Mr. Murphy, your limousine’s waiting.
Eddie Murphy: Thanks Sammy. Sammy went to Harvard.
Working hard increases the chances of success is a better way to phrase it but networking is basically a necessity and luck is paramount
Having lived in quite a few countries now, it’s all about who you know. It’s extremely hard to get a job when you don’t have a network.
I was going to say that I’ve learned that networking is like 90% of getting ahead. Treat everyone you work with and know well, keep in contact with them every once in a while, and it can, not that it will, pay off.
Worked for me. I’m lucky.
And in Cuban’s case, you just have to exploit the fuck out of a shitload of people. Only way to create a billionaire.
No plan has ever come to fruition without a substantial amount of luck -Reality.
“Success is the intersection of luck and having rich parents.”
I mean having rich parents itself is already luck.
I kinda want to say success equals hard work times luck. Some people’s luck is 0. No matter how hard they work, they’ll never be successful. Other people are born to rich parents and have luck in many other ways too. These people will easily achieve success through hard work.
Only problem is, it’s possible to achieve success with luck alone and no hard work - just be born to billionaire parents and you’ll NEVER have to work a day in your life.
So maybe it’s even worse than that: success = hard_work * luck + luck
That’s the propaganda that supported the meritocracy narrative.
US was never a meritocracy. Country is owned by a few people and their people always got the first cut.
We did have sufficient economic growth that daddy’s kids couldn’t take up all good positions in society. So some plebs were able make to make it up the economic ladder. Ie boomers
Now there is not much space left for talent so nepo babies get these good jobs so gen z can watch rich people’s crotch fruit on socials while living in poverty.
They still can’t figure why they are poor 🤡
The flowchart is more that you may get lucky once or twice in your life, and work and preparation are meant to take advantage of those instances instead of screwing them up.
Some poeple have their parents buy them hundreds of lucky chances, other people never get a shot.
And then there’s a hell of a lot of Dunning–Kruger being interpreted as not having a chance. Meritocracy is a lie, but idiots thinking they have cosmic bad luck and society is against them when they’re actually idiots, assholes or both is also definitely a thing. The problem is it’s hard to separate the two, particularly if you’re the idiot/asshole.
Also some people have cosmic bad luck AND are assholes.
This is also possible. And great luck and success while being assholes as well.
The human temptation to read cosmic morality patterns into reality is both entirely irrational… and kind of a good motivator to create moral patterns to impose on reality, if you put some effort and collective action into it.
IMO success is based entirely on the choices you make with the opportunities you get.
LUCK is the opportunities you get.
But the better choices you make with your choices the better the opportunities LUCK provides.
And those born into better opportunities can snowball them into a life where as those unlucky enough to start at 0 stay there by design
Every day, I think about how lucky I am. Because my father stressed education and taught me to read and forced me to do summer writing projects. Because I enjoy reading and learning as a result (even though I hated those projects). That I was born to a family that didn’t suffer financial hardship. That I’m male in a world that rewards that. That I’m a white guy in a country that punishes everyone else. It’s fucked up.
My high-school economics professor was such a smart dude.
The most important part of his entire class was driving home the truth that no matter how hard you work, your success will always be determined mostly by luck.
And how economies aren’t something to “win” but a tool for society to give people what they need/want in exchange for contributing to society.
Well, yeah. But there’s also plenty of times where you can’t capitalize on good luck without a fair but of hard work. Generally, to succeed, a combination of luck, work, and help will all play into that success.
Work pays off most of the time.
It doesn’t generally pay you enough though.
