No they are not. Yes, there is more opportunity in some settings than others but the people with the skills are much less likely to be passed by by that opportunity than everyone else. There's a lot more opportunity that usable to the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation) and have the drive to do so (hustle).
Again, imagine 1 does not occur. You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?
No one is saying that there aren’t factors to increase luck insofar as people are saying that success doesn’t necessarily have a linear relationship with preparation or hustle.
IE. Person A who earns 100x more than person B did not necessarily prepare 100x harder, or hustled for 100x as much. Person A may only have hustled/prepared 10x or 5x as much, or 0.5x as much and just got exposed to better opportunities.
> You hustle and there is never a lucky opportunity. Do you still achieve success? You prepare for a job interview and you never get the opportunity to interview. Do you still achieve success?
You don't achieve success, nor do you experience luck. In this case you describe, are you unlucky, or are you simply bad at "hustling" or whatever work you are putting in?
Hustling on its own doesn't guarantee good luck. Nothing does; it just (if done right, sometimes) increases your odds.
I think one of you is saying that neutral situations should allow one to scramble up just due to willpower alone. I'm not sure I agree.
But some people are born with one foot in a bucket. They just keep getting hit by sic relatives and floods and what have you and everything they get never lasts.
> the people who are in a position to take advantage of it (preparation)
In a great many cases this boils down to already having enough money to survive a failure in a condition that you can get up to hustle again.
If you are supporting a family, the size of that financial backstop needs to be bigger. For every story of person X who bet their family's security and ended up a big financial success, there are far more who ended up in the negative.