Feeling lucky?

Luck plays a much bigger role in success than most people believe. And failing to account for the role that luck plays can make fortunate people less likely to share their good fortune.

We all like to believe that we are the architects of our own success. It is through our hard work, focus and determination that we have risen about the crowd and succeeded where others have fallen by the wayside. Many successful people believe that their success is almost exclusively the result of their own talent and effort. And because they are responsible for that success, then they rightly deserve the rewards that come with that success. They earned it!

But what if was to tell you that luck plays a role, and perhaps a really important role, in determining whether we are successful or not. Does that change the way you think about success?

Meritocracy is one of the dominant paradigms of our society - the belief that success is due mainly, or indeed solely, to individual talent and effort. This includes characteristics such as intelligence, skill, ability, motivation, persistence, focus and work ethic. The natural assumption is to attribute success to the ability of people to leverage their inherent talents and effort. And similarly, to attribute lack of success much more to a lack of effort.

Daniel Kahneman in ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ said:

Success = talent + luck

Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

There is a body of research that suggests that talent (for example general or emotional intelligence), is not a strong predictor of job success, notwithstanding that something like intelligence is clearly more important in more technically demanding roles or occupations. Similarly, effort, motivation or grit explains even less in terms of successful outcomes. And if you take out talent and effort, you are left with luck – which according to some studies might account for up to 45% of success.

If success was correlated with innate attributes like intelligence, then we would expect to see the distribution of wealth (a proxy measure of success) approximate the normal distribution of intelligence. Yet what we see is that wealth is heavily skewed, with a very small percentage of the population having the highest incomes and accumulating the greatest wealth. Hard work and grit alone cannot account for such a disparity.

What is also interesting is that people with higher incomes and greater wealth are more likely to attribute the success of wealthy people to hard work rather than luck. There is no doubt though that we consistently underestimate the role that luck has played in our lives.

Consider this. Everyone who is reading this now is extremely, unfathomably lucky. We are lucky to be alive in the context of human evolution. We are lucky to be alive in this time – because our lives would be dramatically different if we were born 100, or 500 or even 2000 years ago. We are extremely lucky to be in Australia – a country that is relatively wealthy and free and with boundless opportunities (notwithstanding some significant inequality that persists and in fact is growing wider). Many have benefited from opportunities provided through networks that they happen to belong to. These are all things that are out of our control – the circumstances of where and when we were born. Luck.

Yet we don’t like to consider that luck has played a part, because it devalues all of our hard work and effort. Ego is one reason that many people underestimate the role of luck, chance and circumstance. But hindsight and survivorship biases also play a role too. It is easy to forget the many who have failed and focus only on those who succeed, searching for patterns which may explain that success.

In ‘Fooled by Randomness‘ Nassim Taleb said:

Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.

Remember that nobody accepts randomness in his own success, only his failure

If you are successful, then recall bias also influences how you think about your own success, and therefore the success of others. Difficult circumstances become etched in our memory – the hard work and long hours of study, the challenges of working as a health professional. When you run into a headwind, everything seems a little more challenging, and we know we have worked hard. But you don’t notice the tailwind quite so much that gets you home a little quicker. The barriers are etched in our memory much more than the enablers. We recall the times we were unlucky – when we didn’t get that promotion or someone else achieved more than we did. But if we are successful – then that was all our doing. Interestingly, whilst successful people often fail to attribute any of their success to luck, they can be very quick to attribute bad luck when they experience negative circumstances.

Why is understanding luck important? Because it gets to the heart of something that is really important, and that is inequity. We are not all born equal – we are born with different talents, different abilities and also, significantly, different opportunities. As much as luck plays an important role in success, it also plays an important role in the other direction. People can find themselves in circumstances outside of their control. If we underestimate the role of chance, we are less likely to share our good fortune with those less fortunate. ‘I earned this success through my own hard work and effort, so I alone should benefit from the rewards.’

When we see inequality increasing, and people are struggling to access basic and necessary healthcare, it should give us pause to reflect on the role that luck has played.