ABATTBQ11 said:

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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.

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I saw the video when it came out a long time ago. I wasn't asking what was the point of the video. I'm asking about the point of this thread.

El_Zorro said:

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

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You clearly don't understand the concept...

Do you really want to claim that a person's parents and childhood upbringing have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on their life choices?

The entire point is that outcome is combination of personal choice and action and essentially random external factors. At no point had the claim been made, "You personally played no part," and you're just willfully ignorant of you think that.

To point out the paradox, because it seemingly alive and well here.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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To point out the paradox, because it seemingly alive and well here.

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How so?

ABATTBQ11 said:

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El_Zorro said:

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

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You clearly don't understand the concept...

Do you really want to claim that a person's parents and childhood upbringing have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on their life choices?

The entire point is that outcome is combination of personal choice and action and essentially random external factors. At no point had the claim been made, "You personally played no part," and you're just willfully ignorant of you think that.

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It's totally irrelevant. You cannot change the immutable like where you were born, when, to whom, and your individual personal traits.

I agree that two of my law partners that had attorney parents had an easier path than me. So what? I had opportunity and that is all anyone can ask for.

Dwelling on the immutable is foolish at best and poison at worst. It is the seed of envy.

You might enjoy listening to podcasts from a guy named Kwame Brown.
Kwame Brown was the overall #1 pick in the NBA Draft back in 2001 selected by Michael Jordan's Washington Wizards.

He's 6'11" and talks about how he has uncles, cousins, etc. that are anywhere from 6'10" - 7'1" and none of them could play basketball or keep their lives together.

As for your airplane crash story, you have to realize very early in life that there are things you have absolutely no control over. Therefore, you can't worry about that stuff for 2 seconds.

Two quick cases in point

• A buddy of mine in San Francisco was obsessed with getting a motorcycle. He bought the bike, bought all the safety gear took how to ride classes, etc. Six months after he started riding, he was doing everything right and a car pulled out from a side street and hit him. That totaled his bike and put him in the hospital for a week.
• Back in the 1980s when hijackings to Libya were a thing, my family missed our flight from Athens to Rome. They rebooked us on the same flight the next day. Then at the last minute, they found an earlier flight for us so we took that one instead. The flight they originally booked us on got hijacked to Libya. Absolutely nothing you could have done about that. But luckily we dodged that bullet.

Now if you want to talk about happenstance and call that luck, OK.

I'm happy to acknowledge something like getting to meet a bunch of 1980s hair metal rockers simply due to the happenstance of living in an apartment next door to a rock singer. It was nothing I did and no amount of hard work would have got me into the friend zone, even if I purchased a meet & greet to every show.

Despite the happenstance of that opportunity, actually meeting all the people I met through that guy required staying out until all hours of the night, dealing with a bunch of "bros before hos" stuff, turning down a lot of drugs, buying my fair share of drinks for people, taking guys to the airport, letting them park their car at my house for free (you'd be amazed at how cheap musicians are), literally watching chicks let you grab them by the P, etc., etc.

And if you really want to do your head in, none of that even happens if my wife could tolerate cold weather and/or I never got laid off from my job in Denver. Not to mention living in that particular apartment of all the apartments out there in LA.

Here's a little Kwame Brown "Bust Life" sample.

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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What is your definition of luck that we are operating by?

1st example - what caused the first set of parents to be millionaires? Do we discredit the actions that preceded us?

Second example - two identical associates would both invest in the same company. Pretty hard to be identical, even for identical twins.

Third example - they are not equal staffs. One has a skill advantage on their staff that produced a genius technical idea.

Fourth example - two identical people don't exist again. If we want to get crazy and say they did, outside of a coin flip determining which one got which role there still isn't luck.

Does luck exist even within true randomness - i.e. dice, lottery balls, coin flips? Or is it merely probability and playing the odds?

Personally, I would argue luck is the envious assigning chance to someone else's success.

Alternatively, what is the butterfly effect in the small day to day decisions in one's life over time?

John Adams quote: "We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it". I have not come across very many people who deserve success who haven't achieved it. But then, what is the definition of success?

There is some genetic predisposition and aptitude for different interests and skills. But if it's not developed through good HABITs like hard work and focus, then they don't help very much in achieving success.

whiryno said:

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John Adams quote: "We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it". I have not come across very many people who deserve success who haven't achieved it. But then, what is the definition of success?

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Exactly!

My definition includes not living with my parents and paying my own bills.

My brother's definition has more to do with climbing the social ladder in a small town.

One of these definitions of success is much more available to anybody. The other definition definitely requires some bit of luck.

one MEEN Ag said:

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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.

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Where I agreed with him was, yes, we could do a 4 day training and then follow it up with additional training and education. However...

Training adults from all over the world (I had students from 53 countries over a 7 year period), you learn pretty quickly that you're never going to get quota carrying technical sales people out of the field a second time much less a third time. And that's even if they're local to the training site.

If you're bringing over a guy from India, Africa, smaller markets like Vietnam, Iceland, etc., you're going to be hard pressed to get their business unit to pay for a second flight. So you've got to make as much as you can out of that single trip.

And with adults who have boyfriends, girlfriends, wives, husbands, kids, pets, etc., the best way to train them is to get them away from home and get them all together in the same time zone.

So, my method prevailed until I got laid off. After my departure, they cut the new hire training down to 4 days for a year. After that, they decided that their new hires weren't getting enough training. I laughed the big - I told you so laugh. And went on about my business.

I will say this though, we did a really good job during my 5 years at the helm and it is tough to compete against the folks that my team trained. It's not solely because of our efforts but it was definitely a factor.

ABATTBQ11 said:

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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.

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I seriously cannot believe you brought up Enron. That's too funny. Here's why.

In December 1999, I had made the decision to move on from a good paying job at Dell in North Austin.
I did 3 interviews and got 4 job offers.

• Enron - $4k per year salary increase and working at 1400 Smith Street
• Software Vendor - $15K per year salary increase and wanted me to move to Dallas
• Software Vendor - $15K per year salary increase and I could stay in Austin with 100% travel
• Computer Systems Reseller - $20K per year salary increase working at their office in Denver with 75% travel

I have family in Houston/Galveston and I wanted the Enron job to be closer to family. Especially considering the Astros new ballpark was named Enron Field. You gotta figure I'd get some free tickets from time to time.

I interviewed with the IT Team for the Energy Operating Trading Company of Enron. I didn't know much about their business. At Dell, we built PCs all day every day and we competed against the likes of HP, Compaq, IBM, Gateway, etc. You could go over to the assembly plants at Metric 12 or Parmer North 1 and see the systems being built.

So I asked these guys what they do. They said, they trade energy. Sounded like a strange concept but I sort of get it, if everybody is connected to a grid, maybe a guy in Corpus Christi has lower costs than a guy in Dallas or Beaumont gets hit by a hurricane and they need energy (electricity) from San Antonio, etc.

Then I asked them, who do you compete against? Their answer was "lots of people". I gathered that Enron was the big kid on the block in this market but surely there's a #2, #3, #4 who is up and coming that they're keeping an eye on.

The answer was, these guys couldn't name a single competitor they traded energy against. Frankly, it sounded almost as hinky as Crypto sounds today. I understand that a lot of people in the back office work for a business and collect a check and have no idea what that business does. But the fact that they couldn't name a single competitor - not one. That was a gigantic red flag.

So yeah, I could have worked at Enron in a skyscraper in Downtown Houston. I could have gone to a bunch of Astros games. That would have been a childhood dream.

But that's the thing, some dreams aren't worth achieving, or by the time you get to where they're within reach, if you do a reality check, you realize that the risk is not worth the reward.

Enron had a couple other layers too. Like the bit about investing your 401(k) 100% in Enron stock and the Enron "5 Year Plan" for employee stock purchase.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed 3 stock splits during my time at Dell but anybody who reads anything about investing will know that investing 100% of your savings in any single thing is a bad idea. And investing 100% in the same place where you collect your paycheck is a bad idea. And having a spouse with the same employer who is doing the same thing... extra bad idea times 6 at least. That's not lucky/unlucky, that's willful ignorance.

HollywoodBQ said:

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ABATTBQ11 said:

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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.

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I seriously cannot believe you brought up Enron. That's too funny. Here's why.

In December 1999, I had made the decision to move on from a good paying job at Dell in North Austin.
I did 3 interviews and got 4 job offers.

• Enron - $4k per year salary increase and working at 1400 Smith Street
• Software Vendor - $15K per year salary increase and wanted me to move to Dallas
• Software Vendor - $15K per year salary increase and I could stay in Austin with 100% travel
• Computer Systems Reseller - $20K per year salary increase working at their office in Denver with 75% travel

I have family in Houston/Galveston and I wanted the Enron job to be closer to family. Especially considering the Astros new ballpark was named Enron Field. You gotta figure I'd get some free tickets from time to time.

I interviewed with the IT Team for the Energy Operating Trading Company of Enron. I didn't know much about their business. At Dell, we built PCs all day every day and we competed against the likes of HP, Compaq, IBM, Gateway, etc. You could go over to the assembly plants at Metric 12 or Parmer North 1 and see the systems being built.

So I asked these guys what they do. They said, they trade energy. Sounded like a strange concept but I sort of get it, if everybody is connected to a grid, maybe a guy in Corpus Christi has lower costs than a guy in Dallas or Beaumont gets hit by a hurricane and they need energy (electricity) from San Antonio, etc.

Then I asked them, who do you compete against? Their answer was "lots of people". I gathered that Enron was the big kid on the block in this market but surely there's a #2, #3, #4 who is up and coming that they're keeping an eye on.

The answer was, these guys couldn't name a single competitor they traded energy against. Frankly, it sounded almost as hinky as Crypto sounds today. I understand that a lot of people in the back office work for a business and collect a check and have no idea what that business does. But the fact that they couldn't name a single competitor - not one. That was a gigantic red flag.

So yeah, I could have worked at Enron in a skyscraper in Downtown Houston. I could have gone to a bunch of Astros games. That would have been a childhood dream.

But that's the thing, some dreams aren't worth achieving, or by the time you get to where they're within reach, if you do a reality check, you realize that the risk is not worth the reward.

Enron had a couple other layers too. Like the bit about investing your 401(k) 100% in Enron stock and the Enron "5 Year Plan" for employee stock purchase.

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoyed 3 stock splits during my time at Dell but anybody who reads anything about investing will know that investing 100% of your savings in any single thing is a bad idea. And investing 100% in the same place where you collect your paycheck is a bad idea. And having a spouse with the same employer who is doing the same thing... extra bad idea times 6 at least. That's not lucky/unlucky, that's willful ignorance.

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That's actually not a bad thing for the following reasons.

You both work for company so have an extreme advantage here regarding insight and knowledge of how the company operates and it's product line and business health.

You both can have a direct impact on the success of the company through your effort and contributions you each make employees. By owning the stock, you are betting on yourself, and on your coworkers and managers and executives that you personally know and can evaluate their performance.

You cannot get any better due diligence, or get any better direct involvement in an investments success, than you get when you work there.

Now you may lack diversification, but that risk is reduced dramatically because of the above mentioned factors. If you work there you should be able to assess if it's a good investment or not, and if you see red flags as an employee, then don't remain invested.

1000% agree with the video. I don't know how many things we tried and failed at before becoming successful with business and life. I think anyone that is truly successful has to recognize the role luck and breaks play in their success. If they don't, they are not scrutinizing their path close enough or at all.

For most of us, the first lucky thing to have happened is being born in the US.

Before I go any farther, I should say that I wholly believe in the power of hrs work. I work very hard myself and am enjoying the fruits of that focused effort.

That said: I think some of the rebuttals to my example post are missing the point a little bit. I'm not going to go back and explain every little bit, because the idea is that in an environment with path dependence, feedback loops, and noise there will be divergent outcomes. Chaos and complexity mathematics show this quite clearly, as well many experiments have been done where mathematically identical and very simply agents are turned loose in an artificial environment. They proceed to differentiate into "economic strata" by pure chance. If that can happen in a simple computer simulation, how can we dismiss the idea that it happens in a reality that is infinitely more complex and messy?

Let's take one of my examples, the associates joining a PE firm. As mentioned, the point of the thought exercise is that they are identical, but let's flesh it out.

They went to the same program at the same university and applied to the same jobs. Firm A picked Alex, Firm B picked Barry.

Firm A invested in a tech company prior to Alex's starting date that would go in to change the world, making billions. Firm A made a huge return for its LPs, and everyone at the firm was a hot commodity when it came time to raise another fund. Alex was retained, promoted, became a partner through his diligence and acumen, and was able to leverage early success and contacts into a highly lucrative career.

Firm B invested in another tech company before Barry started, and this company would never solve the technical issues. As a result, the fund had poor returns and the managers were not highly regarded in the PE world as a result. They ended up downsizing and Barry got laid off. He got a job as a financial analyst at a big corporate making an ordinary salary. Through his diligence and acumen, he advanced steadily up the corporate ladder and retired as a director making a solid annual salary.

There's not anything particularly artificial about that example. The private equity world can be very path dependent and enormous rewards accrue to people who were in the right place at the right time. I can tell you that one of the most impressive PE guys I know is at a crap firm that is basically hoping for a miracle while i know unimpressive guys who got in the right door and rode a hot streak to vacation homes in three countries.

None of that means that Alex didn't deserve his success nor that Barry was unsuccessful by most standards, but chance still played a real role in one of them being top 1% and the other being top 0.01%.

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.

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Yeah, this is bull****, to an extent.

You were fortunate enough to have been born in a country where the poor are fat, basic education is free and a right, and exceptional health care is readily accessible. By virtue of posting here on a college-related message board using complete sentences, you were likely blessed with above average intelligence from your parents. That was pure ass luck that you weren't born with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Then there are those who do the right thing, make the best choices they can in life, and still have misfortune **** all over them.

SWCBonfire 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.

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Yeah, this is bull****, to an extent.

You were fortunate enough to have been born in a country where the poor are fat, basic education is free and a right, and exceptional health care is readily accessible. By virtue of posting here on a college-related message board using complete sentences, you were likely blessed with above average intelligence from your parents. That was pure ass luck that you weren't born with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.

Then there are those who do the right thing, make the best choices they can in life, and still have misfortune **** all over them.

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Yep and liberals here in America crying about opportunity we're all born with those same advantages and failed to achieve.

Exactly

Ulrich said:

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None of that means that Alex didn't deserve his success nor that Barry was unsuccessful by most standards, but chance still played a real role in one of them being top 1% and the other being top 0.01%.

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The Bay Area is polluted with people who "got lucky" and happened to catch a hot hand and bet big on it. There's nothing worse than folks who worked for Google or similar who think they're that much smarter than everybody else. Of course on the other hand, they took a chance that they might be out on the street.

The Bay Area is also riddled with stories of people who are on their 10th job in the past 5 years (pre-pandemic). Chasing that unicorn. Doesn't matter what the company does - watch Silicon Valley and see Dinesh's cousin's "Bro" App.

Likewise, the same goes for musicians. I know a lot of replacement players who are just as good or better than the people they replaced. But... like Nikki Sixx wrote for the intro to "The Dirt" -
"It could have happened to anybody but it didn't.
It happened to us"

There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time with the right skills to take advantage of the situation.

Of course life involves a ton of luck. You're lucky you were born in America instead of Rwanda. You're lucky you were born in the 20th century and not 25,000 years ago. You're lucky you weren't born to a mom who abused drugs or alcohol or decided to have you aborted.

The fact is anyone who is born healthy and into modern day western society is already exponentially better off than nearly every human who has ever existed. All of us here won the existence lottery.

Now want you do with that golden ticket and how much success you have relative to your peers is a majority effort and a minority of luck in most instances but certainly not all. And all of us spend our whole lives one second from an accidental early death. How many times in your life are you THAT close to a devastating car wreck or other accident only by happenstance did you avoid?

A couple other factors that might unknowingly contribute to your success are:

• Who you align with in office politics and office empires
• How well you jump on the bandwagon and parrot the corporate narratives

At my last employer, there was a reason why all of the senior leadership below the C-Level were British Commonwealth folks.

The Indians, Canadians, Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, etc., all had no trouble staying on the corporate message and not asking questions. By comparison, Americans are terrible at this.

I think this explains a lot of our current political divide. Not in the traditional Left/Right perspective but from the Establishment/Populist perspective.

Both Right and Left have growing Populist factions (Trump on the Right and Bernie on the Left), and both are feuding with more Establishment factions within their party (Bush/Cheney on the Right and Clinton/Biden on the Left).

The Populist perspective is "The System is broken. It is rigged where we are prevented from succeeding despite following the rules and working hard. It has failed us and needs to be changed."
The Right Populist wants to change the system back to how it was in the glory days of yore.
The Left Populist wants to burn the system down and replace it with their dystopian socialist commune powered by unicorn farts.

The Establishment perspective is "I succeeded due to my own hard work and effort. Anyone who did not succeed is stupid/lazy/etc and deserved to fail. Therefore The System is working like it should." Also, the current status quo allows for a lot of corruption within the establishment, which also disincentivizes change.

HollywoodBQ said:

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Ulrich said:

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None of that means that Alex didn't deserve his success nor that Barry was unsuccessful by most standards, but chance still played a real role in one of them being top 1% and the other being top 0.01%.

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The Bay Area is polluted with people who "got lucky" and happened to catch a hot hand and bet big on it. There's nothing worse than folks who worked for Google or similar who think they're that much smarter than everybody else. Of course on the other hand, they took a chance that they might be out on the street.

The Bay Area is also riddled with stories of people who are on their 10th job in the past 5 years (pre-pandemic). Chasing that unicorn. Doesn't matter what the company does - watch Silicon Valley and see Dinesh's cousin's "Bro" App.

Likewise, the same goes for musicians. I know a lot of replacement players who are just as good or better than the people they replaced. But... like Nikki Sixx wrote for the intro to "The Dirt" -
"It could have happened to anybody but it didn't.
It happened to us"

There's a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time with the right skills to take advantage of the situation.

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True on the musicians. Lots of unrecognized talent. Labels select who they can brand to teens. That's the whole entertainment industry, lots of nepotism, for example, many actors today had parents who were actors that could network for them.

There was a local musician that would play bars in the area and played regularly at my local brewery. He did cover music but he was incredible, incredible vocals, better than most of the original artists. The second time I saw him playing I went up and told him how great he was and asked if he had any songs of his own that he could play. He was so happy I asked him to play one of his own songs, because without the request he really is hired to just play alt rock everyone knows. So he performed his song and it was phenomenal. He gave me his card and an album of his and refused to let me pay for it (I tipped him well of course many times). This guy is one of the best I've ever seen live and here he is performing in bars on weekends doing covers of 90s and 2000s rock. Turns out he had a few of his own albums on his websites, great music, just not chosen by the gate keepers for mass marketing. I was really glad I made his day asking him to play one of his own songs, you could see his immediate excitement and joy to be asked.