Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky • Hacker News Board

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#261

Post by snarf21 » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #255

100k wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big point that Robert Frank makes in "Success and Luck" (the book this interview is about). Being born in a developed country is one of the luckiest things you can have happen to you. He talks about his time in Nepal for the Peace Corps and a man who worked for him, who was one of the most talented people he's ever worked with. He was also illiterate and living in a developing country, so his prospects were…

But doesn't that require us all to agree that life is provably better for people in developed countries? We have the highest rate of anti-depressent usage in the world, and also happen to be the richest nation in the world. I reject the concept that simply being born into a wealthier country or wealthier family automatically means your life is going to be "better" than someone who was born poor.

I think this thread was really about opportunity. The original comment was about whether people's opportunities for success were based more on "luck" or their hard work. "Better" is a lot like "fair", who is to say? People would be exchanging one set of problems for another to go from poor/undeveloped to rich/developed.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#262

Post by ghgfhgfhn » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #256

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the universe is also a place where it rains on your head, and then the sun burns your skin off, and wolves casually stroll in and eat your children. That's what the universe does when left to its own devices, and we don't like that, and we change it. "It is the way it is because it's natural" is a pretty naive fallacy.

> and we don't like that, and we change it. And the ones who do the work to change it reap the biggest rewards that come from those changes.

Oh, do they?

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#263

Post by charlesdm » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:20 PM UTC

greggman wrote: post #221

colanderman wrote: post #103

The article (and some comments here) seem to conflate luck and what I will call lot . "Luck" I define as random happenstance during one's life. You can manage luck. Doing so is the central theme of many board games. You can increase your luck "surface area" by taking more chances. Entire industries (e.g. insurance) exist to manage luck. Your "lot", on the other hand, I define as what you were born with. How you were…

I've seen lots of examples of luck. This is not to suggest that tenacious people wouldn't succeed in some way or another but only that their current positions would be different. Some good examples: Ed Catmull in his own book mentioned all the luck he had becoming Pixar. Pixar was a computer hardware division at ILM. ILM wanted to get rid if them. They almost got sold to a computer company (lucky they didnt). They go…

It's more probability than luck. Anyone with moderate intelligence and who is willing to make a commitment to building wealth can say, make 5 or 10 million in life. It might not be easy nor quick, but from what I've seen, it's definitely achievable (i'm not there yet). You do however need to build up a specific skillset.

At least 90% of the population is either 1) not interested in acquiring wealth, or 2) not willing to put in the effort. Becoming a billionaire, on the other hand, is obviously something completely different.

Half the trick is making sure your money works for you. Once you have, say, $5m, it's not all that hard to turn it into $10m. All you need is time.

I've seen guys make hundreds of millions (and lose it all) through great and bad investing. But a commitment to making money is probably the most important thing you need.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#264

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:24 PM UTC

Hasu wrote: post #131

chrishacken wrote: post #68

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think any one denies the role luck plays in one's success or not. However, to completely discard effort and determination is selling everyone short. I'm running a successful company partially because of "luck", I happened to start it at the perfect time, but also because I pour every ounce of money and time I have into it. My nights and weekends don't exist. Some people aren't willing to…

This is exactly what the article is talking about. You're not acknowledging how much of your success comes from luck, you see yourself working hard and you don't like being told you're lucky. You're not only lucky because you started your business at the correct time, you're also lucky because you had the resources and connections to be able to start a company in the first place. Most people never have that opportuni…

[deleted]

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#265

Post by crusso » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:25 PM UTC

voxic11 wrote: post #259

hnal943 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Value creation is what we want to reward, I think.

This can be very hard to nail down though at the large scale. For instance Trump managed to secure the largest tax break in New York history in the 80s by convincing the government that his buildings for the Uber rich would be very valuable to the city.

That's a direct example where government power rewarded a crony.

Reward for value creation is something that the free market does every day in trillions of transactions.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#266

Post by crusso » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:31 PM UTC

kelnos wrote: post #206

crusso wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples?

A single-payer healthcare system is your government mitigating the effects of your bad luck. Giving you a tax break for gains on certain kinds of investments is your government rewarding your work. (That's not traditional "hard work" in the sense of expending physical energy, but deciding what investments to make is certainly work.)

Well, I guess if "simultaneous" means that different parts of the government with different programs can have opposite effects, okay.

But I'm talking about a program that mitigates the effects of luck while (in the same program, with the same methods) rewarding effort.

They're mostly opposite effects and there's no way to reliably distinguish hard work from luck. That's why there's so much debate on the subject.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#267

Post by phil21 » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

stillsut wrote: post #187

Swizec wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add a third category: fortune . Lot is what you were born with. Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck. Fortu…

I'd separate hard work into two components: A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living in the unheated apartment. One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other people would pay for that experience.…

This is a very interesting comment, articulated better than I have been able to explain to others.

I've always been fond of saying showing up to work on time and working your butt off is the low bar to success. All this does is buy you entrance to the ride, and opens up doors of opportunity for you which are worthless unless you take advantage of. Just working hard at some dead-end job 9-5 doesn't get it done, there are millions of people who can successfully do this and get nowhere in life.

Finding someone who understands the 'B' work is by far the most important part of their career is rather rare. I've called the lack of motivation to do this from the vast majority of people "laziness in thought". It's much harder to gain discipline and do well in this part of your career than simply showing up and doing what you're told as well as you can.

It also doesn't help that the school system more or less trains you almost exclusively for the "A" type work, and actively encourages ignoring the "B" and letting someone else handle it for you. This is a very hard attitude to break as taking control of your own path is rather scary.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#268

Post by crusso » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 3:00 PM UTC

ergothus wrote: post #33

My father and I have somewhat productive political conversations: He's fiscally conservative, I tend towards the liberal side of the scale. Drilling in to find what we really disagree about, it seems to boil down to two concepts: (1) I view success as a matter of luck that your effort can make better or worse. He views effort as the single most important deciding factor in success in life (2) I'm willing to tolerate…

While I agree that luck vs work is a key distinction between people that seems to drive political differences. I think that desires regarding the future are even more fundamental.

Looking to the future, I would like to see cancer cured in my lifetime. I'd like to see aging cured or at least I'd like to get a lot more quality years out of my life. I'd like to see a real cure for my failing knees, eyes, and memory.

None of that is going to happen if we throw up our hands and rely upon luck. Because no matter what "reasonable" ratio you put on the luck to work formula for success, work is non-zero.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#269

Post by Frondo » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

hnal943 wrote: post #175

Frondo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed that the government should reward hard work, but I'm always uncomfortable with the discussion around what is hard work. Some poor people I know, they work harder than most of us desk monkeys, because they're doing back-breaking labor day after day. Holding down two, three jobs, shuffling around town on the bus to work 60, 80 hours a week for very little money. This is not even an uncommon story. People working…

Value creation is what we want to reward, I think.

So, what value is a hospice worker or a nurse creating to the world?

What value is a grade school teacher creating?

Hotel rooms need to be cleaned, and your coffee needs to be made. What value is that hotel room cleaner bringing into things? Or the dude framing drywall in your house?

To me, to be honest, "value creation" sounds more like "the stuff I like to think I'm doing" than a real thing.

Re: Don’t Tell Your Friends They’re Lucky

#270

Post by allemagne » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 3:16 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #235

100k wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big point that Robert Frank makes in "Success and Luck" (the book this interview is about). Being born in a developed country is one of the luckiest things you can have happen to you. He talks about his time in Nepal for the Peace Corps and a man who worked for him, who was one of the most talented people he's ever worked with. He was also illiterate and living in a developing country, so his prospects were…

This is kinda a weird thing to call "luck" though. "You" could also have been born a duck, a 1000 years ago, in the future or in another universe (maybe). But then "you" would have been somebody else and hence, not "you" at all. In other words, "you" had 100% chance of being you . No luck involved.

I definitely agree. The universe being almost certainly deterministic, there is also a 100% chance of everything that has ever happened happening.

It's still useful to think as if different people could have been born in different circumstances. You could think of it as a mental shorthand for the idea that differences between human beings are arbitrary, and it makes no sense to argue that a human inherently deserves an impoverished life over another human.