Luck Isn't Just Luck

When it comes to people who are insanely successful, in the vast majority of cases their success comes from a combination of 2 things: rich parents and luck. When I say “rich parents”, I generally mean relatively rich parents. It doesn’t matter how genius you are if you grow up poor with no opportunities, you won’t get far in life because the world is not a meritocracy.

Luck, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated. It’s not just about being at the right place at the right time, but it requires being lucky enough to have things go right many, many times in a row. Success compounds on itself, so being lucky once or twice isn’t enough.

There are also a bunch of other factors which are strictly luck:

Being born in a rich country
Being born in a rich family
Being born with good genes
Being born in a time of peace
Being born in a time of technological advancement
Being born with a good personality
Being born able bodied
Being born with enough intelligence to put your luck to good use
Being born in the first place (which, by the way, is a 1 in 400 trillion chance)

There’s essentially nothing anyone can do about any of these things, so it’s strictly a matter of luck. Most of these factors are environmental and beyond our control as individuals.

This flies in the face of the “hard work” mantra, which is often used to justify the success of the rich and famous. The truth is, most of them were just lucky. Being lucky isn’t a bad thing, but you should never confuse luck for genius or hard work.

Hard work is great if you can combine it with your inherent privilege, but it’s not a substitute for it. If you’re not lucky, you’re going to have to work a lot harder to get the same results as someone who is. And even then, you might not get there.

The term “tabula rasa” is latin for blank slate, and it’s the idea that we’re all born with a blank slate mind, and our success in life is determined by our actions. This is a nice idea, but unfortunately the world doesn’t work like that. A child born in poverty in a war-torn country is not going to have the same opportunities as a child born in a wealthy, peaceful country, even if they have an off-the-charts IQ, a great work ethic, a winning personality, a beautiful face, a perfect body, and so on. There may be exceptions, yes, but everything in the universe comes down to probabilities and when all the cards are stacked against you, the odds are not in your favor.

We are not, however, born with a blank slate mind. So much of who we are is a matter of genetics, environment, and innate behaviour passed along from our ancestors through our DNA. Twin studies, for example, have shown that identical twins raised separately are more similar than fraternal twins raised together, which suggests that genetics play a huge role in who we are.

In psychology, the debate over nature vs. nurture has been ongoing for ages, but most of the evidence points to the fact that while the nuture part is important, in practice the nature part is vastly more important. This goes against the tabula rasa idea, and it’s something that a lot of people want to reject because it doesn’t fit the world believe that anyone can be anything if they just work really hard.

Ideas like tabula rasa might be comforting, but I think people can fall into the trap of believing in what amounts to fairy tales simply because nobody wants to tell them the truth. Classic examples of this are people who work in the arts and have ambitions of being a famous musician, painter, actor, and so on, but they simply lack the awareness to see that they’re not talented enough to make it. Some exceptions exist, but generally this sort of distribution is true for many things that select for the best of the best (like sports, youtube celebrities, onlyfans models, and so on). The distribution of gains is not linear, it’s exponentially biased towards the very tippy-top of the pyramid.

Plenty of people are happy to sell you the dream of being the next big thing. For example, there are now youtube training camps for children who want to become the next big youtuber. If you have to go to youtube training camp to become a youtuber, you’re probably not cut out for it.

We’re not completely powerless, of course. We have enough free will that we’re not subject to the whims of fate, nor are we merely floating in the wind like a leaf. We make our own choices, and we can choose to put ourselves into situations that improve the odds of our luck. For example, if you want to be a famous musician, you can move to a city with a thriving music scene, or if you want to be a famous actor, you can move to Hollywood. If you work in computers, you can move to Silicon Valley. You can also network with like-minded individuals to improve your odds of making the right connections. You can improve your skills with practice, and so on.

I suppose the final point I’m trying to make is that we should all be grateful for what we do have, because simply being born in a Western country (for example) is a huge privilege, and statistically incredibly unlikely. We can’t all be the next Taylor Swift, but we can all be grateful for the privilege of being alive and having the opportunities we do have.

Being ambitious is great, but so is practicing gratitude and being realistic about your own abilities (doing otherwise is setting yourself up for disappointment).