I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?
Attributing everything to luck is:
A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.
B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.
You can't see the luck in having a life experience that motivated you to become financially successful? I mean, I know financially successful people and they go around judging poor and middle class people for their bad financial decisions, and I'm just thinking--well, maybe they did not have the education to help them do that, or they did not have a life experience that woke them up, because it is actually possible to be perfectly content with being poor/middle class or for it to never occur to themselves to question their circumstances?
Already, we can make an example of you--you can't think beyond your own circumstances, and you think that just because you made a choice to better your life and succeeded in it, then people whom you don't deem successful must simply be choosing to not make the choices that you did. I'm sorry, but even if you come from a painful background, that doesn't give you a pass to say that your path to get where you are is supposed to be the same for everyone.
Luck determined the circumstances I grew up in, I didn’t control than. My choice to lift myself out of that environment has nothing to do with luck at all, that was explicitly a deliberate choice I made. My mechanism for accomplishing it had nothing to do with luck either, I moved out of home (and subsequently removed myself from that environment) by getting a job as a bartender.
1. The ability to move out of your house. There are places in the world where people don't have as much freedom of movement because they are not as democratic as countries in the west.
2. Been hired as a bartender. Need I say that this is not a choice that you made, but by your then-employer, or that it was possible for such a job to exist in the first place because you found another town with enough economy to create such jobs, while many other places in the world are not as fortunate?
Good for you wherever you are in your life right now, but I hate to break it to you buddy--you didn't do everything yourself, and you were lucky to have an environment that enabled your growth and to have other people to play a part in your success.
I have worked across many places in the developing world, and every place I’ve been to (apart from perhaps North Korea) has opportunities for people who want to improve their own lives. In many places the path would look different than it does in the west, but I know hundreds of people who have pulled themselves into the middle classes of emerging economies simply through hard work and commitment.
Getting a basic, entry level, no skill job has barely anything to do with luck. I guess I’m lucky that I was born, and that my mind and body works. But that’s all the luck you need to attain that level of success, nearly everywhere in the world.
That’s a rather smug and ignorant way of looking at somebody pulling themself out of what was basically a ghetto. Being able to take financial responsibility for myself was a tremendous success for me at the time, and it was an absolutely essential first step for me to take in building a much better life for myself.
It is averting abject immediate failure at best.
Definition of success for more people would be starting a family or helping theirs out.
Which you almost certainly cannot do these days with even copious amounts of hard work, not you can build something just ever slightly more with that.
Savings? Don't exist really, are subject to every whim and throw of economy. Use a calculator and multiply how much of forever you will have to work to establish basic stability.
As is your boss of that gastronomic business, even in North Korea.
Owning an actual place to live that will not be taken from you on a whim, hmm?
Even farmers are subject to a degree of luck they're not always allowed to play around...
You're just pushing goal posts. And „basic stability“ in many parts of the world is much simpler than westerners look for. Savings to keep roof over your head and food on the table for next few months in many cases is success.
There's no objective way to determine what is success. It depends a lot on one's background.
Pretty much at every stage of your life involves luck. You can't merely escape it by exercising any agency, only make some outcome more probable than others.
Everything is up to chance if you take such a reductivist view. But if you choose to do the things that increase your chances of success, and choose to avoid the things that decrease your chances of success, then success is merely a matter of time.
But luck is still important. I have a non tech background and got my first tech job through a friend I knew from a completely unrelated hobby. Less than a year later, our startup was acquired, making my unvested options well in the money, and within five years I had earned more money than many if not most Americans earn in their lifetimes. Many people working at startups never get the kind of windfall I got within a year (and given the length of my tenure, I can hardly claim any credit for the company's success at the time of acquisition). I probably would have made good money eventually, but it easily could have taken far longer or not happened at all had I not known my hobby acquaintance.
Of course luck isn't the only reason for anyone's success or failure, but it plays a huge role.
Why does it always have to be this binary choice (Hence the "everything" qualifier I guess)?
You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.
I've always attributed hard work to basically buying more chances to play. Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.
I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).
> Why does it always have to be this binary choice (Hence the "everything" qualifier I guess)?
My theory: the mind works in binary by default - it is a quick and dirty (and low energy) heuristic to make predictions, and reality/causality/etc from the perspective of an observer is fundamentally prediction based.
If you think that's weird, you should see all the other sub-perceptual weirdness going on in this thread.
> You can certainly work hard to succeed and also realize that a lot of your successes are just that, attributed to "luck" or things out of your control. This isn't to take anything anyway from hard work.
Technically, it does kinda/plausibly take something away from hard work in that you are attributing the causality of outcomes to luck vs hard work, based on unacknowledged speculation.
> Hard workers tend to succeed because they get more pulls at the slot machine. Just because you "win" doesn't change the fact that you're still playing the percentages.
Technically, you are necessarily speculating here, perhaps while criticizing the speculations of others for being speculative?
> I think the type of person who is probably more likely to succeed is one that doesn't believe in luck (i.e. not willing to just accept the lot that was given to them).
And not only that, there are other approaches available to humans, like cooperation, which has a dependency on communication and other things. Unfortunately, there seems to be more than a few unrealized bugs in the stack so outcomes are (presumably) less optimal than is possible. My hope is that we try to change this some day, but I do not anticipate this happening.
Because luck has almost nothing to do with success. Luck might play a role in any particular event, but over time if you do the things that are conducive to success (including, but not limited to, hard work), and avoid the thing that are conducive to failure, then you will become successful.
The comment I initially replied to attributed success to the luck having a good childhood, and several people have chimed in saying I was also lucky and should attribute my own success to having a miserable one. All of this is clearly just unfalsifiable, post-facto rationalization to support the insane luck hypothesis. Your life is far too long to be governed by luck. If you have goals, then simply being dedicated to them over a period of time essentially eliminates the influence of luck (unless your goals are specifically highly luck dependant).
I, too, hate the hand-waving away of any success as being based entirely on "luck". I often find those who make that argument are just as you say, using it as a rationalization to not even try.
I would still disagree with your point, though. There are swathes of people who worked their ass off and got nowhere. My own successes in life (if I'm to be honest) have had their roots in an off-chance break or what not. I suppose you could attribute that to hard work and being set up for success, but nothing in life guarantees that if you try 100 times you are owed success.
I think in the nitty gritty of life, it doesn't make a difference what your philosophy is. Just work hard and count your blessings. Those that subscribe to no luck will work hard and if they fail, would probably never blame it on bad "luck" anyway. Those that blame luck as a reason to not try would probably would not have done anything even if luck wasn't a factor.
> If you have goals, then simply being dedicated to them over a period of time essentially eliminates the influence of luck
This is the just world fallacy in a nutshell. Are you consciously saying that every parent in history who watched their children starve to death was just not dedicated and hard working enough? Perhaps didn't have 'feed my children' as a clear enough goal?
Good on you. I have often wondered how much genetics plays into success and personal discipline (which I would argue can increases ones _odds_ at various points in life). I come from a lower-class background, but am doing quite well today in my late thirties by most metrics. I can easily recognize some turning points in my life where luck played a role. At the same time, I easily recognize times in my life where good luck was a result of earlier decisions and sacrifice.
All this is only interesting though when I compare my life to my siblings. I have talked about this with my parents to some extent. Some of my siblings just seem to be terrible decision makers, and seem to not have any ability to think forward. My older brother's life is a complete disaster, and it is hard to piece together why, because all macro things considered, we were dealt the exact same cards--yet he seems incapable, and always has, of practicing self discipline or instilling any ambition.
In short, I think luck definitely plays a major role, but I also wonder if genetics is more at play than people are willing to admit. If such is the case, it could make conciliation extremely troublesome in some circumstances.
> I think luck definitely plays a major role, but I also wonder if genetics is more at play than people are willing to admit.
I certainly include genetics in the 'luck' component of life, and I am under the impression most people do. ADHD and autism, for example, are extreme examples of genetic impact on executive function, which is commonly confused with willpower and other 'personal decisions'.
> I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?
So all of the children out there who currently live in poverty, surrounded by drugs and violence are actually lucky to have such a good source of motivation on hand? And all of the children out there who are currently growing up in stable environments are also lucky to have a home conducive to positive development? So who is not lucky? It seems to me, by this standard, everybody is lucky. Or do you need to wait and see who is successful before you decide which circumstances are lucky, and which are unlucky?
It's not the environment based on which luck is determined. Luck is if the environment stimulates the intrinsic or initial programming of the brain in a way that result in a positive outcome.
> I was raised by a drug dealer/drug addict/gang member single mom. One of the reasons I’ve been financially successful is because I never wanted my life to be like the lives of the people I grew up around. Where’s the luck there?
Well,
1. You were born in a rich country.
2. You were born in an age where the phrase "financially successful" even makes sense. You could have been born in the stone age, for example.
3. You were born as a human. You could have been a mosquito (16,000x higher odds, actually)
Well we’re all humans, and we’re all alive at the same time, so we’ve got a perfectly level playing field there. And no, I wasn’t born in a rich country.
It's hardly a perfectly level playing field. Some people inherit millions. The older generations own all the housing.
Living at the same time means very little. Try entering a game of Monopoly after a few rounds have been played, and see how your chances of winning drop to almost 0.
and some of the others were having the opportunity at the right time, making the right connections at the right time, and the other hundreds of things that went right for you and might not have.
Not crediting at least some of your success to random factors that you had no control over is a mistake, too.
There are people out there who worked as hard as you but failed because of those random factors.
Attributing everything to luck is:
A) A coping mechanism for people who don’t want to do the work required to succeed.
B) A rationalization technique for people who think they should be entitled to the fruits of other people labor.