The Role of Luck in Life Success
blogs.scientificamerican.com
The Role of Luck in Life Success
1–10 of 213 posts
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#2You can only get lucky if you position yourself to be able to get lucky. In addition, you need that carpe diem attitude to exploit any lucky breaks.
A business opportunity is not gonna magically appear if you are not constantly looking for one and you won’t be able to exploit it if you haven’t learned relevant skills and built a network.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#3I've at times stated that anyone who says that luck isn't important has possibly never had any success in life.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong in any pursuit. Hard work shrinks the error bars in the distribution of success but doesn't make them disappear.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#4You can only get lucky if you position yourself to be able to get lucky. In addition, you need that carpe diem attitude to exploit any lucky breaks. A business opportunity is not gonna magically appear if you are not constantly looking for one and you won’t be able to exploit it if you haven’t learned relevant skills and built a network.
Lucky I just happened to be on HN to read this comment, otherwise I wouldn't have known I needed other skills to take advantage of opportunities that arise.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#5You can only get lucky if you position yourself to be able to get lucky. In addition, you need that carpe diem attitude to exploit any lucky breaks. A business opportunity is not gonna magically appear if you are not constantly looking for one and you won’t be able to exploit it if you haven’t learned relevant skills and built a network.
I think one has to be lucky to have talent, and the education and upbringing required to learn how to exploit that talent, in addition to having opportunities to take advantage of it. Not even getting into socio-economic challenges due to race and class.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#6You can improve your chances of success with hard work/perseverance though.
1. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
2. Give up
vs.
1. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
2. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
3. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
4. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
5. Try -> (luck roll) -> fail
6. Try -> (luck roll) -> success!
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#7You can only get lucky if you position yourself to be able to get lucky. In addition, you need that carpe diem attitude to exploit any lucky breaks. A business opportunity is not gonna magically appear if you are not constantly looking for one and you won’t be able to exploit it if you haven’t learned relevant skills and built a network.
A million factors determine your trajectory long before you either do or do not prepare for this or that opportunity.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#8If you sit on the couch all day doing nothing, you wont get lucky. Sure, we can identify "luck" as a path to success, but honestly that seems more like survivor bias....
There are a nearly infinite number of events that had to take place for everything to exist in its current state. We can call it "luck" or "randomness" which then leads to specific actions leading to success. However, in reality we are designed to recognize patterns.
If we recognize a pattern and make an attempt to improve our situation, it's not "luck" or "randomness" its a probability of success. Combine that over a life time and persistence will lead to success, not just one random event. It's a series of events that lead to success, each one moving you one way or the other. It's typically your "choice" which path you take.
I think these articles rub me the wrong way, because it leads a lot of people to think - "If it's all luck, why bother doing anything?" When in reality it's only you that can get anywhere.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#9You can only get lucky if you position yourself to be able to get lucky. In addition, you need that carpe diem attitude to exploit any lucky breaks. A business opportunity is not gonna magically appear if you are not constantly looking for one and you won’t be able to exploit it if you haven’t learned relevant skills and built a network.
One could only be so lucky to have the time and resources to be looking for opportunity.
Re: The Role of Luck in Life Success
#10We're on a small rock flying through an infinite universe. Our lives exist in a small blink of time. Computers run billions of operations per second using software with countless defects at every level of the stack.
We're lucky anything works at all. In that context, we succeeded just by being born and living as long as we have, and we'd be pretty narrow-minded to assume that the material success we enjoy is significantly more than a series of happy accidents.