[32qwef]

Cue the people saying "yeah but we all make our own luck" or "luck favors the prepared"

Which misses the point. Of course you have to be good AND lucky to succeed. But not everyone can be lucky. So think of that the next time you're looking a few rungs down the ladder.

[adnzzzzZ]

You miss the point of people saying that "we all make our own luck". It's not about whether you get lucky or not, but the mindset with which you approach the world and how that mindset helps you or not. I wrote about this here if you want a more extended argument https://github.com/SSYGEN/blog/issues/38

[tert45ty54wy]

I have to read your essay in more detail. I see a lot i disagree with. But if the gist of what your saying is is "ignoring luck will help you persevere" I can see the logic.

However, I'm not advocating a cynical mindset. I'm advocating a compassionate one, and a realistic one. If you don't think luck matters, you can delude yourself into thinking the people below you didn't work hard enough, or that you must be especially talented and driven to have gotten where you are.

I've also seen people hurt themselves with that mindset. The guy who risks everything on some business venture that's doomed to fail, yet he thinks he can beat the odds because he's smarter or more hard-working.

How about having an absurdist approach towards luck. "I'm probably going to fail, and I'm going to do it anyway." It's honest, it's compassionate, and it doesn't discourage you from trying the impossible. That's how I think, and it's worked well for me.

[mercer]

I think the distinction between how you see yourself and how you see others is particularly important, and I find that it's often conflated when I have arguments about things like poverty.

Attributing things too much to luck in your own endeavours might lead to learned helplessness, among other things. Whereas assuming that the bum on the streets quite possibly got into his predicament because of bad luck seems like a safer and more compassionate assumption to make.

But factually speaking, I'd say much more than we'd like to admit is out of our control, which is one of the reasons why I am in favor of societies with strong safety nets and hefty base-line of compassion.

[jameslk]

Side note: it's pretty clever you're using GitHub's issue tracker for blogging. Besides it being weird for navigation, I suppose it has all the features you'd need such as tagging, comments and search.

[ralston]

Github issue tracking doubling as a personal blog = effin genius

[rdlecler1]

Central Limit Theorum tells us that luck will be normally distributed even if you’re sampling from people who work hard. Sure hard work may shift the mean to the right compared to a random sample of the general population, but you still get a normal distribution. Now if being lucky is being in the top 2% from a random population, how much does hard work shift you to the right? You need to shift this distribution pretty far to make the case that work alone can overcome luck.

[alexpetralia]

The sampling distribution of the _sample means_ (averages) will be a normal distribution.

The population distribution need not be normal.

[hshehehjdjdjd]

I don’t believe we all make our own luck nor do I discount the role of luck in my own success. However the model used in this study is very weak and does not supply much evidence, of you ask me.