[JangoSteve]

This is so true. I've started a few startups and had a good acquisition. I've since made it one of my missions to espouse the underappreciated role that luck plays in a successful startup, and in life, in general.

You don't often hear it from people who have had the kind of success that leads them to being keynote speakers, I think, because everyone wants to feel like they deserve the success they've gotten. So, survivorship bias tends to kill this message. I think it's important, though, for people to understand when evaluating decisions (past, present, and future) and for learning from and empathizing with others.

Everyone likes to think of life as a meritocracy; that when you succeed it's because of the decisions you made and actions you executed. But people can make the right decisions for the wrong reasons, or vice versa. People can be prevented from making the decisions they'd like through no control of their own. And perhaps most significantly to the point, two different people can make the same decisions with different outcomes.