I figure this will stir up some controversy here. Well worth the 10 minute watch.




My thoughts:

The astronaut simulation was clever, and it makes sense. In a large enough pool for a small enough number of positions (or outliers), the variance in top level talent or ability is going to be very small, and likely smaller than the precision with which we can measure or estimate it. In the astronaut example, a randomly distributed skill score from 0 to 100 could, on average, be expected to produce 180 perfect scores in a pool of 18,000 applicants for 11 slots. If you bumped the skill score precision to 0 to 1000 you could still expect 18 perfect candidates for 11 slots. Even still, there's going to be very little statistical significance between individuals at the top who barely miss perfect scores. So if we throw in some randomly assigned natural variance, or luck, that ends up being what separates out a number of those best of the best of the best individuals in real world progresses. It isn't necessarily individual merit, but a combination of merit and randomly distributed, beneficial noise that pages that tiny handful up to the top. Think of that extra 5% as the random distribution of happy coincidence and how that separates people out.

I also like his advice to ignore the variance of luck, as despite the role of luck, your actions and inactions still play a large part in success (you miss all the shots you don't take). As his own example shows, he got lucky with someone else featuring one of his videos, but his video would not have been featured if he never made it or didn't produce good content. However, producing good content wasn't enough for him to do YouTube full time until he got lucky with the feature. His success has been a combination of both.

F*** google

https://odysee.com/@veritasium:f/is-success-luck-or-hard-work:a

This is of course true for the limited number of extremely high paying jobs/outcomes like CEO, tech billionaire, athlete or entertainer etc. Or even just upper management

This is why the "systemic [fill in the blank]" crowd focuses on these outliers to make their point and push their agenda.

Merit/hard work alone is enough to ensure someone pulls themselves out of poverty in America. Or for a middle class upbringing to self replicate. The stats on this are overwhelming

If you are able to retire with a few million in the bank, you are in the 1%.

Is that luck if you worked at a mid level manager job for 30 years and put away enough to retire?

Most entrepreneurs fail multiple times before real success.

Hard work, and stepping up to the plate multiple times, is going to do nothing but increase your luck.

If course, if you want to go with something low risk like middle management, you can get pretty wealthy with very little luck.

The key is to keep trying and not get discouraged. You only have to connect one time, and a whole bunch of new opportunities open for you.

Bird Poo said:

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If you are able to retire with a few million in the bank, you are in the 1%.

Is that luck if you worked at a mid level manager job for 30 years and put away enough to retire?

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If you watched, then you would know that yes, some of it is.

Great video. Veritasium is such a great channel.

Another great book on this topic is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

Lol. Not watching thst socialist drivel. Work harder, make your own luck.

"The harder I work, the luckier I get."

Will watch the video after I leave the office.

I smell a commie!

So this guy gives us a synopsis of Outliers which was a quick read anyway (I read it cover to cover on a 14 hour flight between LA and Sydney - I highly recommend it by the way).

Getting into Business Class was luck.
At that time, the company travel policy was that I had to log 100,000 miles in Economy Class to qualify for the next year.
And then, I only qualified for Business Class on flights over 10 hours long.
I thank my lucky stars that I was able to log 175,000 miles in Economy Class the first year that I qualified for Business Class the following year.

Here's a more inspirational video since we were all "lucky" enough to be born in the USA.

It's not a synopsis of Outliers. He used a single example because it's a well known and easily explainable example.

ETA And the premise of Outliers was much different. It was more centered around the 10,000 hour rule, not specifically the role of luck. One is focused on the causes of statistical outliers, while the other is more focused on the product or consequences of statistical noise on individuals and how we often fail to recognize it.

There is no such thing as "luck".

You put yourself in position to succeed and eventually the right opportunity arises.

Don't do drugs. Don't get a divorce. Stay healthy. Work hard. Save.

It's a formula that has worked the last 100 years for millions of people in this country.

There's no such thing as an overnight success.

Let's not be irrational. Luck is very real.

Compare two people. They are equal in every way: intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, creativity, risk appetite, everything. One is born to millionaire parents who send him to high end private schools with a direct line into the ivies. The other is born in a middle class family and goes to a mediocre public school in a flyover state.

Another example: two identical hard-working associates join different private equity firms in their 20s. Before they started, one fund invested in the next Google, the other in the next Theranos.

A third: Two experienced business leaders are working in the same field at small companies. They each have a equivalent engineering staffs. One staff has a genius technical idea that could revolutionize the field; the other doesn't.

Fourth: two identical business development people go to work for the same company. They are assigned to different product lines. One product line turns out to have unforeseen applications that make it the hottest product in town; the other turns out to be carcinogenic and everyone in the division is laid off.

In each example, is one is more likely to end up rich? Was it hard work that created the different probability? Sequel post on the way.

Sequel post:

Hard work is incredibly important on average. Being willing to put in the hours is critical for most of us, and it will never reduce your chances. As the video says, the best way to achieve success is to pretend that luck has nothing to do with it and that it's only your own capabilities, because that will drive you to maximize your capabilities. All true. But I've been around too many people who were born into the right family, or flipped a coin and picked the right job, or who took a big risk that could have bankrupted them but instead made them wealthy. Of course, perseverance is important too: a lot of big successes failed first.

And to some extent we're also talking about really big successes. I think that just by being conscientious and consistent you can carve out a great life for yourself. But that may be a life without the massive upside that so many think is their due.

Malcom's Gladwell Outiers book report? Sheesh, at least give the guy a mention.

Luck and timing seems to me to have just as much to do with getting where you want to be in life as does having the requisite skills. Can be a real beating on your mind when you spend untold amounts of time trying to break through something but the lucky break nor timing lines up. I'm going through that now trying to break in to an industry.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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It's not a synopsis of Outliers. He used a single example because it's a well known and easily explainable example.

ETA And the premise of Outliers was much different. It was more centered around the 10,000 hour rule, not specifically the role of luck. One is focused on the causes of statistical outliers, while the other is more focused on the product or consequences of statistical noise on individuals and how we often fail to recognize it.

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But Gladwell does mention the role that luck played with respect to his ancestors private boarding school in Jamaica. Epilogue - page 271

My copy is in the bookcase right next to my desk. Just out of arm's reach.

Another role of luck that Gladwell talked about was the Jewish lawyers who were barred from the White-shoe law firms. So when the type of law they practiced became needed, they already had their 10,000 hours.

I used to run technical training for a $4B/yr business and my manager believed that our two week new hire course took too much time. I discussed the Outliers book with him and the 10,000 hour concept. We were trying to cram as much of that as possible into about 75 hours.

He countered with this turkey's Ted Talk and taking 20 hours to learn a joke song on a joke instrument.

Ulrich said:

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Sequel post:

Hard work is incredibly important on average. Being willing to put in the hours is critical for most of us, and it will never reduce your chances. As the video says, the best way to achieve success is to pretend that luck has nothing to do with it and that it's only your own capabilities, because that will drive you to maximize your capabilities. All true. But I've been around too many people who were born into the right family, or flipped a coin and picked the right job, or who took a big risk that could have bankrupted them but instead made them wealthy. Of course, perseverance is important too: a lot of big successes failed first.

And to some extent we're also talking about really big successes. I think that just by being conscientious and consistent you can carve out a great life for yourself. But that may be a life without the massive upside that so many think is their due.

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Many who think it's their due are people like my sister who are onboard the Yang Gang and want their $1,000/month UBI without having any idea where it comes from.

I've worked my ass off to get where I am so it is pretty insulting when I hear that it was luck, or the color of my skin, or hair, or the country I was born in (nobody ever gives enough credit to Puerto Rico), etc., etc.

I graduated from A&M with a 2.5 GPR. So in a sense, yes, I was lucky that I didn't get selected for Active Duty and instead had to pursue finding an Engineering job in Austin in a crappy economy in 1994.

It was definitely luck that a co-worker who works for the EPA today, dropped this thing called the World Wide Web in my lap and a project to put air permitting regulations online for the State of Texas.

But, it's what I did with it that made the difference. I could have said, I'm a degreed Engineer from Texas A&M, doing this IT stuff is not what I do and it is not going to help me get my PE license. I adapted. Made the most of it and kept going from there. Never did get my PE license.

You can't beat yourself up about paths not taken, situations never offered.
I'm currently looking at 1,500 resumes from Indians for the 1 semi-technical job I have open on my team. There are going to be 1,500+ who are going to be disappointed.

Sure, some people will always have better generational wealth situations that you do. That has been true since the beginning of time and will continue to be true - forever.

I've written about it before on here but I was picked for the second Fire Academy class in Austin in 1994. Out of 1800 people who tested that night in Palmer Auditorium, I ranked something like 108th after scoring 98% on the entrance exam. I didn't get the 5 point Veteran's preference because I was in the National Guard and not a Veteran. For the record, the top score was 103 (98%+5)

About the time I got the call for the Fire Academy, I had agreed to take a Construction Inspector job with the Highway Department for $1500/month. Same job I had as a college summer job in Galveston. Not really what I went to A&M to do.

I was scheduled to start work on a Monday and I got the call on a Friday that the TNRCC wanted to hire me as an Environmental Engineer for $2500/month. Luck? Great timing anyway.

Hard work in any of those scenarios and I wouldn't necessarily wind up at the same place I am today but, I would have wound up somewhere far away from where I started. And luck would have been a minor factor.

Now, if you want to talk about calculated luck. It was very obvious to me that after Desert Storm, our business in Iraq wasn't finished. One of my greatest financial achievements was not taking a $100K/yr pay cut to deploy to Iraq with my old Guard unit in 2005. Luck? Or reading the tea leaves and making an educated guess.

Yes, he talks about it, but it isn't the focus of the book. He focuses on the creation of outliers, however they're formed. Luck is certainly one of those, but there are others. That's why it is called Outliers and not Luck.

This is closer to The Drunkard's Walk or Fooled by Randomness and the idea that since life is highly probabilistic, you don't have the complete control that you like to think you do. This is why he mentions egocentric bias and our overestimation of our own ability and contribution. We tend to discount the noise around us and rationalize explainability instead of accurately interpreting the contribution of random circumstance. That's why people are very good at rationalizing explanations in hindsight, yet we are still bad at forecasting.

Take the astronaut example. The original random distribution of talent and work ethic represents who you are and what you do. It is the distribution of talent and the will to act on it, so the, "Just do X,Y,Z and you'll be successful," stuff is already baked in there. Think of this as a static model of people. If you were to forecast the people with the highest skill score being the ultimately chosen individuals, as if randomness played no part, you'd be wrong because no one lives in a vacuum. We all have interactions with each other and the world around us that affect us in some way. Think of people as particles and this as the Brownian motion of our existence. Even if we can control our motion to a degree, we can't control everything else that bumps or doesn't bump into us. If you think of us in this way, we will all have some net displacement from our starting location at any given time based purely on random interaction, the same way that particles in Brownian motion do. This displacement is essentially our luck component in the astronaut model, and it represents the net effect of randomness on our lives. In the astronaut example, we can see what this randomness does to the overall outcome because it is split apart from the regular random distribution of talent, skill, and motivation. That randomness reshuffles things regardless of our talent, skill, determination, etc.


Yes, in some ways people can make their own luck, but you still don't have complete control over that. You talk about flying, but if your next flight crashes, you cannot create your own luck to survive through ingenuity or dedication. You are entirely at the mercy of chance. You can choose the airline with the best safety record, the seat with the highest probability of survival, familiarize yourself with crash landing procedures, and any of many things to ensure your safe arrival, but none of that matters if the captain finds out his wife is cheating that morning and decides to take a nose dive from 30,000 ft. Q


In that same vein, pursuing certain strategies does correlate to good outcomes, but that is potentially a confusion of causation and correlation. If you do all of those things mentioned above and are never in a plane crash, can you pat yourself on the back for a job well done? Probably not because commercial airplanes are generally safe anyway. All your effort was superfluous, and the correlation is spurious. Similarly, graduating high school, buying a home, not getting divorced, etc may correlate with good personal outcomes, but there's no proof of causation. It's just as, if not more, likely that the kind of person who will achieve good outcomes is the same kind will do those things. They're not a cause, but a correlated consequence.

People like to mention the Stanford marshmallow experiment and follow ups and how children's willpower and ability to delay gratification aids them in life, but few are aware of the follow up studies and modified experiments that call that into question. The original experiment needed to demonstrate that the children understood the task and primed them with proof that the researcher would indeed follow through and give them two marshmallows. A follow up study sought to introduce uncertainty into this by demonstrating to the children that the researcher was unreliable, and when compared to a control group of children with a reliable researcher, this cohort gave up much faster and ate their marshmallows rather than waiting. The implication (and this has been shown elsewhere) is that when faced with higher uncertainty, we tend to over discount future returns and pursue immediate reward. Willpower and delayed gratification are in many ways learned behaviors, not necessarily innate, and if you don't learn them it's hard to practice them. Children who grow up in instability learn to pursue such strategies of immediate gratification not because they have some kind of character flaw, but because they are optimal in their situation. It's one thing to say, "Graduate high school, buy a house, don't get divorced, and you'll be successful" but it's something else entirely to say, "Be born into a stable family with reliable and involved parents to ensure you have the best chances of developing and learning the behaviors that will give you the best chances to graduate high school, buy a house, and not get divorced." That isn't to say people have no agency, but let's not pretend that they have equal agency in their development as children and that such development plays no part in their life.


JD Vance touches on this when he talks about how when Appalachian whites moved into Midwest, the benefit of jobs and opportunity did nothing to change their culture because their parents raised their children in the same manner they were raised. He certainly made the best of himself and overcame probability based on the circumstances he was born into through his own high level of personal responsibility, but there is a question of where that sense of personal responsibility came from and how responsible he is for developing it. Some of it may be innate, some of it may be self-discovered, and some of it may be a product of living with his grandparents and the environment he was raised in. So while circumstance undoubtedly presented him with adversity, it also presented him with minor advantages that probably helped him overcome that adversity as well. Credit to him for taking full advantage of it, but he didn't necessarily or intentionally create those advantages or opportunities either (namely the influence and stability of his grandparents and his exposure to evangelism and stable family life of his dad, however brief). He is as much a product of his raising as he is of his own accord, as are we all.

Bird Poo said:

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There is no such thing as "luck".

You put yourself in position to succeed and eventually the right opportunity arises.

Don't do drugs. Don't get a divorce. Stay healthy. Work hard. Save.

It's a formula that has worked the last 100 years for millions of people in this country.

---

Mostly true, but there is always a luck element. Ulrich put it well in his posts. Put simply, life isn't fair in many, many ways.

Being born at the right time, to the right parents, in the right geographic location, can have an enormous effect on your success, whether you're a hard worker or not. How hard you work just affects the level of your success.

larry culpepper said:

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Bird Poo said:

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There is no such thing as "luck".

You put yourself in position to succeed and eventually the right opportunity arises.

Don't do drugs. Don't get a divorce. Stay healthy. Work hard. Save.

It's a formula that has worked the last 100 years for millions of people in this country.

---

Mostly true, but there is always a luck element. Ulrich put it well in his posts. Put simply, life isn't fair in many, many ways.

Being born at the right time, to the right parents, in the right geographic location, can have an enormous effect on your success, whether you're a hard worker or not. How hard you work just affects the level of your success.

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I can see that. However, I think a person's perspective depends on whether they accept their lot as "luck". It's a very hard pill to swallow if you earned success while having a terrible family life, lived in poverty, from a shlt-town in SE Texas. That is me.

It smacks of the "white privilege" BS that liberals like to flaunt as some sort of reason for a person's success. It spits in the face of those who CHOSE to overcome their "bad luck".

Know who else thinks in terms of "luck"? Children. How often have you heard your kid say "he/she is so lucky". And that's when we correct them and say "you can have that someday too, if you work hard for it".

I think y'all are both right though. Your coming from the point of 'how quickly can we get these people to mastery' and he's coming from 'how quickly can we get these people to do the bare minimum?'.

Mastery will come with time, experience, and ambition. Knowing the basics can be crammed into a few days worth of training.

Success is a result of your habits that eventually reach a critical mass.

Build the right habits, focus on the right things, and success is guaranteed.

Some skills are more important than others. Even not being smart or incredibly gifted, just being reliable and focused, being enthusiastic, and learning to make other people feel good, those things will lead to success.

And I believe a lot of "talent" is just marketing talent, not actually talent in the area being marketed.

Perception is reality. A lot of very average people have a lot success because they learn how to market themselves well and build relationships with people. Not because they are the most talented or hardest working.

Ulrich said:

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Let's not be irrational. Luck is very real.

Compare two people. They are equal in every way: intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, creativity, risk appetite, everything. One is born to millionaire parents who send him to high end private schools with a direct line into the ivies. The other is born in a middle class family and goes to a mediocre public school in a flyover state.

Another example: two identical hard-working associates join different private equity firms in their 20s. Before they started, one fund invested in the next Google, the other in the next Theranos.

A third: Two experienced business leaders are working in the same field at small companies. They each have a equivalent engineering staffs. One staff has a genius technical idea that could revolutionize the field; the other doesn't.

Fourth: two identical business development people go to work for the same company. They are assigned to different product lines. One product line turns out to have unforeseen applications that make it the hottest product in town; the other turns out to be carcinogenic and everyone in the division is laid off.

In each example, is one is more likely to end up rich? Was it hard work that created the different probability? Sequel post on the way.

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You need to look at the harvard longitudinal study. Its like the worlds longest running longitudinal study every. For like 80 years now. Take a random sample of people, and just track/document their lives. The overwhelming majority of outcomes showed that intrinsic traits dictated your outcomes way more than 'what was given to you.'

Your first example starts with luck, but success always ends with the person. Your following examples aren't even luck. Joining a PE that invested in a google versus theranos? You think the junior guy who just hopped on board is getting a lionshare of the reward for a risk they didn't even get say in? Not even discussing the due diligence difference between 'search engines' and 'lying about the limitations of physics.'

Your third example about ideas. You don't invest in ideas, you invest in management teams. Kudos to the manager who hired a guy who had that ability. Ideas and engineering creativity aren't random. They are the result of aptitude and ambition. Those traits can be seen and screened for.

Your fourth one. Just...thats not even luck. thats just market response and due diligence. ALL of your examples are just 'poor me why can't I ride the right coattails of those around me.'

You want to know one of the biggest psychological differences between those who attain material wealth versus those who dont? The intrinsic belief that they control their outcome in life.

Thats it.

Period.

And you're showing made up example after example of people who don't believe that but yet think they are deserving of the outcomes of those who do.

No one is saying you achieved x,y,z through luck alone, only that it plays a generally underacknowledged role, and that successes and failures are not entirely the result of a person's own doing.

You say that the web was luckily dropped in your lap, helping lead to your current career, and you rightfully take credit for making the choice to with hard and pursue it. On the other hand, there were a lot people who thought they were lucky to land a job at Enron and pursued it just as hard as you've pursued your opportunities. They did all of the right things and worked just a hard, but they had no way of knowing the company they worked for and invested in was a house of cards. The outcome is a product of both the hard work and the right opportunity.

What is the point of this thread? Is it arguing for more government to equal out the results of luck?

If so then that is stupid. It will basically make sure everybody is worse off and therefore less lucky.

Ulrich said:

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Let's not be irrational. Luck is very real.

Compare two people. They are equal in every way: intelligence, work ethic, conscientiousness, creativity, risk appetite, everything. One is born to millionaire parents who send him to high end private schools with a direct line into the ivies. The other is born in a middle class family and goes to a mediocre public school in a flyover state.

Another example: two identical hard-working associates join different private equity firms in their 20s. Before they started, one fund invested in the next Google, the other in the next Theranos.

A third: Two experienced business leaders are working in the same field at small companies. They each have a equivalent engineering staffs. One staff has a genius technical idea that could revolutionize the field; the other doesn't.

Fourth: two identical business development people go to work for the same company. They are assigned to different product lines. One product line turns out to have unforeseen applications that make it the hottest product in town; the other turns out to be carcinogenic and everyone in the division is laid off.

In each example, is one is more likely to end up rich? Was it hard work that created the different probability? Sequel post on the way.

---

Not critiquing, just commenting in line with your sequel post.

1) Some people win the genetic lottery. My hope is that my kids / grandkids are in that pool of lucky people. I will do the best that I can. Don't hate on genetic lottery winners just because their parents rocked. Feel free to hate them if they turn out to be jerks.

2) Hard work + opportunity = luck. What did the Theranos associate do with the next 5 years of his life? He absolutely got paid a good salary by all those duped investors. Lots of opportunities to tackle the next thing. (BTW, I give no sympathy for sloppy due diligence, which is the foundation of the Theranos debacle.)

3) Hard work + opportunity = luck. Did the business leader with the dumb staff give up? Fail to change? Come up with ideas on his own? Learn how to hire better?

4) What did the second BD guy do next? Give up? Get a job at McD's? How long did he sling a harmful product before he pulled the plug?

In each example, is one is more likely to end up rich? Yep. At least in the short term. A fool and his money is easily parted, BTW.

Was it hard work that created the different probability? No. The hard work provided the opportunity for a positive outcome. Not-hard work has a probability of getting rich of approximately zero.

Luck will always be there. But, it's funny how some people just seem to make their own luck somehow.

That's not really true about the longitudinal study. For one, it wasn't a random selection of people, but Harvard sophomores. For two, the basic conclusion is that good social and family relationships are highly important to outcomes, not innate traits. You can't even make that conclusion because the original sample isn't random.

It was also done in parallel with the Glueck study of delinquents, which ultimately found similar results, but it also came to the conclusion that, "In regard to background they are products of homes of little understanding, affection, and stability, in which the parents are usually unfit to serve as examples for their children."

Your parents, family, and early home life are certainly something that is given to you. You really don't have much choice in the matter.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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That's not really true about the longitudinal study. For one, it wasn't a random selection of people, but Harvard sophomores. For two, the basic conclusion is that good social and family relationships are highly important to outcomes, not innate traits. You can't even make that conclusion because the original sample isn't random.

It was also done in parallel with the Glueck study of delinquents, which ultimately found similar results, but it also came to the conclusion that, "In regard to background they are products of homes of little understanding, affection, and stability, in which the parents are usually unfit to serve as examples for their children."

Your parents, family, and early home life are certainly something that is given to you. You really don't have much choice in the matter.

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Every single person in my immediate family, parents, siblings, every one are convicted felons.

I'm in the top 1%.

El_Zorro said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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That's not really true about the longitudinal study. For one, it wasn't a random selection of people, but Harvard sophomores. For two, the basic conclusion is that good social and family relationships are highly important to outcomes, not innate traits. You can't even make that conclusion because the original sample isn't random.

It was also done in parallel with the Glueck study of delinquents, which ultimately found similar results, but it also came to the conclusion that, "In regard to background they are products of homes of little understanding, affection, and stability, in which the parents are usually unfit to serve as examples for their children."

Your parents, family, and early home life are certainly something that is given to you. You really don't have much choice in the matter.

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Every single person in my immediate family, parents, siblings, every one are convicted felons.

I'm in the top 1%.

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Probability isn't individually deterministic. When the weatherman says there's a 90% chance of rain, 10% of the time it doesn't rain. That doesn't mean he's wrong in that 10%, it just means those individual instances were the 10% charge it doesn't rain.

So if 95% of people with your background ultimately turn into criminals, it doesn't mean you will, only that there's a high probability. You not turning into a criminal doesn't somehow disprove the correlation and probable causation either. It simply means you're in the e term produced by natural random variance.

Of course it does. I'm sure it has nothing to do with me.

aTmAg said:

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What is the point of this thread? Is it arguing for more government to equal out the results of luck?

If so then that is stupid. It will basically make sure everybody is worse off and therefore less lucky.

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Not in the slightest. Watch the video.