The Role of Luck in Life Success

While I believe you're right, wealth is the biggest factor, I would say race is probably the next biggest, and gender the next biggest after that. At least here in the USA.

I attest to this. I have had a reasonable success in life (built and sold a few companies, have a financial cushion, a home, a small plane, etc.).

I have done everything well and with diligence but when I look at the flow of my life, the financial success came primarily from luck. Being at the right place at the right time. Having a good idea at the right time. Knowing the right people at the right time. Having the right product pivot in the right market conditions.

Many of these things worked out because of circumstances beyond my ability to predict and control. I have had a similar amount of failures and my ability to predict what will be successful is limited to nil.

Yes, I worked hard and put my all into everything, but so do many others I know. I was also fortunate (lucky!) to have support systems and friends which allowed me to take risks that turned out to be rewarding. I also try to spread the rewards and recognize those people who have allowed me to find this lucky success.

I also have the luck to be in a country that has reasonable government and infrastructure (perhaps notwithstanding the last year or two), lucky to have chosen economically stable parents who gave me a top education without debt at the end, lucky to have chosen (ha) white privilege which I didn’t fully understand or appreciate until the last decade and try hard to expand to everyone now.

Yes, I made some circumstances to benefit from the luck. But so have others who have not experienced the luck. I am grateful for my luck and work to enable others to have a good life without the same luck. There but for the grace (of god or gaia or luck) go I.

Looking back on my life, there are significant successes that were pure luck, and also those that had nothing to do with luck. I'm talking strictly about events here, and not traits. If you want to talk about the luck of having traits, precursors to those traits, and precursors to those traits, then I think that's a totally different conversation.

So I'll focus on events. Most of my success is due to being a programmer. That's not luck (again, disregarding traits!) I was always fascinated with computers and math. I worked my ass off to afford my first computer at age 12. I worked my ass off to learn programming, and I hustled my ass off to break into the industry with no degree.

Within the context of my career, the vast majority of my success comes from a six-month period full of extremely lucky chance events that just fell into my lap. It's like I was blessed for those six months, and every little thing went exactly my way with perfect timing. Working hard, networking, making good decisions - that's all just a baseline. Just the price of entry. Outside of that magical chapter, I was not working less hard, networking less, having a worse attitude, making stupider choices, or anything of the kind. This is why I have a gripe with people who always scrutinize your part in your circumstances. Yes, maybe its a good strategy to focus on what you can control, but in the bigger analysis, if you're trying to be more analytical about it, it seems like BS to me.

I was consistent. I always worked hard and all that jazz. But sometimes, chance events all went my way and I profited massively from it. Most of the time, either nothing happened, or everything that 'should' have gone right, went wrong. So I personally find the luck angle to be the interesting one - not in the motivational, how-to-live sense. Just in the big picture observation sense.

Either it's a case of Fundamental Attribution Error, or the natural tendency for "luck" events is to be negative rather than positive.

Ignoring these external factors isn't going to make them go away and studying them could lead to ideas about removing bias and having more meritocratic systems.