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Looking back on my life, there are significant successes that were pure luck, and also those that had nothing to do with luck. I'm talking strictly about events here, and not traits. If you want to talk about the luck of having traits, precursors to those traits, and precursors to those traits, then I think that's a totally different conversation. So I'll focus on events. Most of my success is due to being a programmer. That's not luck (again, disregarding traits!) I was always fascinated with computers and math. I worked my ass off to afford my first computer at age 12. I worked my ass off to learn programming, and I hustled my ass off to break into the industry with no degree. Within the context of my career, the vast majority of my success comes from a six-month period full of extremely lucky chance events that just fell into my lap. It's like I was blessed for those six months, and every little thing went exactly my way with perfect timing. Working hard, networking, making good decisions - that's all just a baseline. Just the price of entry. Outside of that magical chapter, I was not working less hard, networking less, having a worse attitude, making stupider choices, or anything of the kind. This is why I have a gripe with people who always scrutinize your part in your circumstances. Yes, maybe its a good strategy to focus on what you can control, but in the bigger analysis, if you're trying to be more analytical about it, it seems like BS to me. I was consistent. I always worked hard and all that jazz. But sometimes, chance events all went my way and I profited massively from it. Most of the time, either nothing happened, or everything that 'should' have gone right, went wrong. So I personally find the luck angle to be the interesting one - not in the motivational, how-to-live sense. Just in the big picture observation sense. |
This is the truth, and very hard to convey in a balanced manner. I typically have discussions with people who only want to focus on luck as being part of my (or their) success, and I also have the same discussion with folks who want to only focus on the hard work aspect.
I've found the same. Most of my financial success in terms of "getting ahead" you can look back to a short period of time where everything went right for you and you got lucky. What many folks completely discount is how your consistent work ethic put you into those positions to take advantage of, and of course no one can see the 9 other times you were in similar situations and it all went to shit. It's about getting back up the next morning and taking that tiny step forward again.
I find these discussions pretty upsetting most of the time as I can look back growing up (background sounds much like yours) and think of the kids I grew up around. You could have predicted with near 100% success rate which of those kids turned out to be financially successful and which would not. I imagine it's much harder in more wealthy environments where poor work ethic isn't nearly as damaging, but in a more austere environment it was completely obvious. Those that partied and never worked hard in their early teens pretty much universally have shit lives now. Those that applied themselves have various levels of what most would consider financial success. I truly think luck is a far secondary factor for this type of success.
The difference is luck truly was the only major indicator of who in that "successful" group went from "decent salary in a nice job" to "building generational wealth" - that seems very much more random than a baseline of "middle class" success.