I have been obsessed with luck my entire life. But what is luck? Can it be understood and repeated? Or is it a catchall name we give to all circumstances that we cannot understand and therefore will remain a mystery forever? I have thought about luck in my own life and how luck intersects with hard work to result in success or failure.
I used to listen to this podcast called “How I Built This”, and the presenter would always ask the interviewee about the split of luck and hard work that contributed to their success. Everyone would have a different answer, from skewing all the way to one side and all the way to the other. I was fascinated by their answers, and it always hit me that these people were actually trying to connect the dots in retrospect. They were trying to build a narrative to something that they themselves don’t necessarily understand. But everyone wants a good story that makes sense, and luck has always been an uncomfortable, yet acceptable, way to brush over all the parts that we don’t understand.
My personal conclusions are simple, perhaps too simple. But I strongly believe that hard work can, at best, only take you 50% of the way. You can’t break through that ceiling. The remaining 50% is controlled by the ever elusive concept of luck. What I mean is that whatever you do, however hard you work, you can only guarantee (at best) a 50/50 chance of success. That’s not to say that hard work doesn’t matter, it actually gets you to the point where your odds are a coin flip, and that’s pretty good. But it’s not enough. I can see evidence of this all around me, there are people who work their butts off, yet never seems to taste success. While there are people who barely lift a finger but have the winds of fortune at their back and somehow achieve great success. That’s my mental model for how luck and hard work combine to give you the probability of success. So the logic would follow that since you can’t control your luck, you should work hard to get to that 50% and then hope lady luck smiles on you to push your odds of success above 50%. But what if you could control your luck?
There are many adages about controlling your luck: “Fortune favors the bold”, “The harder you work, the luckier you get”, “Third time lucky”. I think some of these hold the secret to how I think luck can be controlled, and it actually fits well into a mental model that ties hard work to luck. Coming back to our metaphor of flipping a coin, every time you start a new endeavor or approach the same endeavor with a different angle, then you are at best flipping a coin. Give it your all, then your chances of success are 50/50. Knowing this, then the secret to having luck on your side if you end up failing on your first coin flip is to just flip the coin again. Anyone who is familiar with probability knows that if you keep flipping a coin over and over, it is bound to come up in your favor eventually. It is possible that you keep failing over and over again, but it is probable that you will eventually succeed if you keep flipping that coin.
To me, luck is rooted in probability. A concept that is understood by many but can never be controlled. My mental model to control your luck is an attempt at taming the wild horse of fortune and trying to get luck on your side, and I believe that this model fits nicely with the empirical evidence that I see in the world around me.
