Make Room for Luck

"There is an amount of luck in being extremely successful. That's why you have to do a lot of things that help you increase your chances."
(from my tweets, 2015)

I went back and forth on luck in my old tweets. In 2014, I insisted that my success was "not primarily based on luck or on natural talent. It is based on actions," and that people earn their accomplishments: "It is not luck." By the next summer, I was writing that there is an amount of luck in being extremely successful, and that you have to keep doing things that increase your chances.

I think both tweets were trying to hold on to something true. Effort matters. But luck matters too, often more than we like to admit. And how we think about luck turns out to affect both our success and our happiness.

Luck plays a bigger role than we think

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, put it in a simple formula in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011): success equals talent plus luck, and great success equals a little more talent plus a lot of luck.

In 2018, physicists Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Biondo and Andrea Rapisarda tested a version of this idea with a computer simulation. They gave simulated people different levels of talent and exposed them, over a simulated forty-year career, to random lucky and unlucky events. The most talented people were rarely the most successful. The biggest winners were usually people of about average talent who happened to get lucky.

It's only a model, not a study of real careers. But it shows how much chance can shape outcomes, even in a world where talent matters.

Lucky people notice more

If luck matters so much, can we do anything about it? British psychologist Richard Wiseman spent years studying people who considered themselves very lucky or very unlucky.

In one of his best-known experiments, described in his 2003 book The Luck Factor, he gave people a newspaper and asked them to count the photographs inside. On the second page was a large message: "Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper." Many self-described unlucky people missed it. Self-described lucky people were more likely to spot it.

Wiseman concluded that much of what we call luck comes from habits: staying open to new experiences, noticing opportunities, listening to hunches and bouncing back from bad luck. That's very close to my old tweet. You can't control luck, but you can give it more chances to find you.

Admitting luck is good for us

There's another reason to take luck seriously. Economist Robert Frank, in his 2016 book Success and Luck, argued that successful people tend to underestimate how much luck helped them. It's understandable. We remember our hard work vividly, and the lucky breaks less so.

But Frank also pointed to research suggesting that people who are reminded of their good fortune tend to become more generous and more grateful. Recognizing luck doesn't have to diminish your achievements. It can make you a kinder, happier person.

What the philosophers said

Niccolò Machiavelli is remembered mostly for his advice to rulers. But in chapter 25 of The Prince (1532), he offered a balanced view of luck that still holds up. He suggested that fortune may be the arbiter of half our actions, but that it leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.

He compared fortune to a violent river that floods the land when it rises. No one can stop the flood. But in calm times, people can build dikes and embankments so that when the water rises, it does less damage. In other words, we can't control luck, but we can prepare for it.

That's the balance my two old tweets were reaching for. Do the work. Build the dikes. And accept that the river will do what it does.

Some honest caveats

Wiseman's work was published mostly in popular books rather than peer-reviewed journals, and self-described "lucky" people may differ in many ways. The talent-versus-luck model is a simulation built on assumptions, not real data about careers. And there's a risk in overemphasizing luck: if you believe everything is chance, you may stop trying.

So the healthiest view seems to be a mix: effort matters, luck matters, and you can influence how often good luck has a chance to reach you.

How to make room for luck

• Put more things out there. As I tweeted, every time you put something out there, you increase your chances.
• Notice what's around you. Slow down enough to see opportunities you might otherwise miss.
• Try new things. New people, places and experiences create new chances for something good to happen.
• Bounce back from bad luck. Wiseman found lucky people tended to see the bright side of setbacks and keep going.
• Acknowledge your good fortune. Thank the people and breaks that helped you. It makes you more grateful and more generous.
• Prepare in calm times. Like Machiavelli's dikes, build skills and relationships before you need them.

Today's reflection

Think of something good in your life. How much of it came from your effort, and how much from luck? Who or what could you thank for the lucky part?

Sources

• Frank, R. H. (2016). Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Princeton University Press.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
• Machiavelli, N. (1532). The Prince, Chapter 25.
• Pluchino, A., Biondo, A. E., & Rapisarda, A. (2018). Talent versus luck: The role of randomness in success and failure. Advances in Complex Systems, 21(03n04), 1850014.
• Wiseman, R. (2003). The Luck Factor. Miramax Books.