Last mid-month, at least for a while

Essay 9: Is it luck or hard work that leads to success?

Spoiler alert: some of each, but more luck than most people think. A common error is to think that hard work is the sole, or even primary, determinant of success. An excellent book on this topic is Robert Frank’s Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.

When we think of luck, we think perhaps of serendipity—being at the right place at the right time, for example. And this type of luck certainly occurs. For example, Bill Gates was lucky to have early access to a time-share computer.

But luck is much broader. It includes such things as being born in the United States rather than in a war zone. Luck could include being brought up in a stable family that values education. A good genetic inheritance is luck as well. In many societies, being born male is luck. These examples are sometimes referred to as “constitutive luck.”

In short, luck—both good and bad—consists of things you don’t control.

Yet many successful people focus almost exclusively on their hard work to explain their success. Why do they ignore the role of luck? There are several reasons.

“Recency bias” suggests that recent experiences are given disproportionate weight in shaping our understanding of the world. A successful entrepreneur almost certainly has been working hard. As a result, they have a hard time seeing other influences on their successful outcome. This is not a judgment about them; it is a description of a common cognitive limitation.

Overlapping with recency bias is “availability bias,” which has us focus on ideas or experiences that we most easily remember. Those 100-hour weeks are easy to recall (they are “available”), indeed, impossible to ignore.

And when we look at success from the outside, we are under the influence of “survivorship bias.” We see the successful entrepreneurs. We do not see the entrepreneurs who worked 100 hours a week and failed. Economists would say that hard work is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success.

Put another way:

“Meritocratic hubris is the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way.”

Source: “The Hubris of the Well-Credentialed” by Michael Sandel. The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 16, 2020.