[quote=AN]Luck doesn’t mean much if you’re unprepared to take advantage of it or you’re too scared to take advantage of it. Example would be Bill Gates. He took a risk, quit an Ivy League education to start up his company in what’s basically a garage. Yes, there are many people who tried to start up a computer company just like him and did not make it. He is lucky in that sense, but he’s also willing to take the risk and succeed. I’m sure there are many people who passed up on such opportunity because the risk is too high for them and they CHOSE to take the more secure path.[/quote]
This is true, but… I’m sure that there were folks just as smart and hard-working as Bill Gates chasing a similar goal who either failed miserably or ended up with a tiny fraction of his success. Why? The Fates didn’t smile upon them to the same degree they did Bill Gates. Holding up successful people to make a generalization about the traits that led them to such success (a la “The Millionaire Next Door”) suffers from the Fallacy of Composition. That is, the habits of these Uber People should not be emulated unless one can determine how many more people followed a similar strategy but failed to hit it big.
Let’s look at the top of the top percentile of folks who we would define as “very intelligent” and “hard-working” here in the US. And let’s say that amounts to 500,000 folks, just to use a number. That’s about the top 0.015% of the US population. While most of these folks are probably fairly successful, I bet you’ll find a HUGE bell curve of success (defined in economic terms) within this group. And many folks who are not very successful at all. The MAIN difference (although not the only difference) between them: Luck.
I don’t know (and no one knows) the degree of luck involved in one’s life (relative to intelligence/hard work), but I think it’s pretty large. Much larger than most humans are capable of acknowledging.
