[martinni]

Rich people got "lucky" but they don't define what luck is to begin with. To quote Naval, there are 4 kinds of luck.

1. Blind luck - Where I just got lucky because something completely out of my control happened

2. Luck from hustling - luck that comes through persistence, hard work, hustle, motion. Which is when you’re running around creating lots of opportunities, you’re generating a lot of energy, you’re doing a lot of things, lots of things will get stirred up in the dust.

3. Luck from preparation - If you are very skilled in a field, you will notice when a lucky break happens in that field. When other people who aren’t attuned to it won’t notice.

4. Luck from your unique character - You created your own luck. You put yourself in a position to be able to capitalize on that luck. Or to attract that luck when nobody else has created that opportunity for themselves.

[shadowtree]

2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias.

For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.

If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

It's just like in sports. Usain Bolt is not the fastest man alive. He is the fastest professional runner. Within a sample set of 9bn people, there are likely ones with better genetics - but no access or chance to become a professional runner.

This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.

Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.

[imgabe]

> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

Flip that around. There are thousands, if not millions of other kids who grew up with wealthy, connected parents. Why aren't they all billionaires if that's all it takes?

[tathougies]

> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.

On the other hand, suppose you employ 30,000 people each with 10,000 in savings from working at your company. Without your initial labor to get everything set up and get the business going, none of their combined $300 million in assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.

[guiraldelli]

> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit.

> Remember: a million seconds is 11.57 days. A billion seconds? 31.71 years.

That was insightful and I am telling you: I am going to use your argument from now on---it was just beautifully simple and clear!

[umvi]

Is it still survivorship bias if it took 20 failed attempts before a successful one?

[meiraleal]

> If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today. Same IQ, same hustler. But no parents with connections, no upbringing devoid of war and violence.

same IQ, same hustler and you'd have a warlord or a revolutionary leader. There are genius everywhere, and they don't create only software.

[dorgo]

>2-4 are great examples of survivorship bias. >For every success story with those traits are thousands of failures.

I guess that is the reason why 2-4 start with "luck from...".

I read it like this: from the ones who do/are X only a few lucky succeed. But (almost) all who don't do/are X fail. To succeed you need both: luck + X.

[klaudius]

  "If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."

You are unfairly using an extreme example. It would be like saying that someone wouldn't be 6'5" if they had been born in extreme poverty with malnutrition. Yes, extremely bad environment can stunt your growth, but you can't use poverty and malnutrition to explain in general why some people are shorter or taller than others.

There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.

It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.

[refurb]

You’re looking at it way to black and white.

I would bet if Gates had been born in Rwanda, he would have stood a good chance of being successful there, better than average.

[Terretta]

There are African-born self-made billionaires.

// Still on the backs of “labor”.

[ta1234567890]

However, 2, 3 and 4 can be reduced to 1.

You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

In the end, everything is just blind luck, but our egos want to feel like they are in control somehow.

[nostrademons]

Seems like this is a free will argument. In a reductionist view, yes, everything is all blind luck because the universe was set in motion at the Big Bang and has evolved according to the laws of physics since. If you got rich through intelligence, determination, and good choices, that was still luck because your intelligence and determination are largely determined by your genes and your choices by your environment, both of which were determined before you were born.

This argument may be true but it isn't very useful, because the concept of "useful" itself implies free will and active decision-making. In other words, yes, maybe it was all predetermined before we were born, but if you're the sort of person that believes in free will, that decision was predetermined before you were born, so why challenge that belief? And the reason we evolved to believe in the fiction of free will is because humans who did do better than those who don't, so whether it's correlation or causation, it's still adaptive.

[Gpetrium]

Life, in most cases, is built upon all 4 points listed by OP with a varying degree of applicability. If magically, everyone decided to just accept 1 without doing any of the others, you would likely find society going down the drain or the few who attempt 2,3 or 4 with an exceptional return of investment.

I find it difficult to undermine all four 'kinds of luck' when you look at someone studying hard to get into a certain university, or you look at a foreigner deciding to uproot their lives to hopefully get a better life in US/Canada,etc or someone who decided to knock on every door to get their first client and hone their skills throughout that process.

[mikestew]

Hustle and preparation allow smaller quantities of blind luck to be turned into success. Otherwise it takes a lot more blind luck to overcome a lack of preparation, and large quantities of blind luck are harder to find.

So, yeah, it all boils down to #1. But #s 2-4 determine how much of #1 you need.

[jelliclesfarm]

You can’t choose your luck, but your originating genes aka parents did...more reason why there should be a checklist for responsible procreation.

Having children without a plan puts ones own copies of genes at risk. As is not having the resource to raise them well. It’s self sabotage..as it were..by two people who decided to combine their genetic material and their immediate circle of friends, family and acquaintances who enable their sub optimal decision. Society and media should be ignored anyways while making important decisions.

[meiraleal]

> You don't choose your genes or where you are born. Those factors, which are blind luck, determine all of the other lucks for your whole life.

if you workout and are in the best shape your genes can provide, you will be more lucky when meeting people and more interesting people will be interested on you. That would be 3, not 1. And if you have a good conversation and go out every day, you will also have more chance of meeting interesting people. That would be 2.

[dsfyu404ed]

Hustle and preparation are not luck, they're skills you have to hone for them to be useful. You have to actually do something. They aren't something you can be born into (much to the dismay of rich parents with deadbeat kids). By reducing 2 and 3 to luck you're implying that people have no agency. Sure, the person who develops those skills in rural Africa isn't going to go as far as someone who develops those skills in Chicago but they'll both go a hell of a lot farther than the average persona around them.

[LeftHandPath]

It all boils down to just how deterministic you're able to believe the universe is.

Is there a such thing as my own willpower that allows me to improve my position more than an equivalently-placed person would, or is the willpower to act to improve my own situation derived from the blind luck of where and when I was born?

[ChrisLomont]

>In the end, everything is just blind luck

So you claim there is no correlation between, say, hours worked and money earned? That pay is some random variable not causally connected to any decision a person makes?

[ReptileMan]

Genghis Khan was exiled and had nothing by age nine. At the time of his death he left the biggest land empire the world has ever seen to his children. You need very little of 1 to make a difference

[Keloo]

> You don't choose your genes

I agree with this one.

> or where you are born

Not really agree with this, you can change the country you live in. And it's more important where you live not where you are born. For example lots of people from poor countries go to US or Europe and are quite successful there.

> 2,3 can be reduced to 1.

Don't agree either. Let's be realistic, what are the chances of success for a person who stays at home watch movies vs. someone who go out talk with people get involved in all sorts of activities + prepare the homework for those social events.

[hnhg]

I remember another study that looked at people who had made it very rich, and they saw that luck was something like 'being educated in a field just when that field is about to make a huge impact in the world' - in other words, great timing in addition to raw talent. I don't have the link to hand now though.

[marcus_holmes]

I loved the Whats App founder talk at the YC online class (I don't have the link either). I paraphrase: "we decided to make a messaging app just when that was the best, most profitable thing we could possibly have done." There was a ton of experience and talent behind it, but they acknowledge that they got lucky and timed it perfectly.

[drchewbacca]

There's this ted talk to a similar effect, timing is the most important factor in a startups success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpx7gpSqbY&t=1s

[ohyes]

No, this article is entirely about blind luck. None of the things you describe matter.

There are plenty of prepared, hustlers who can capitalize on lucky events. For every one of them that becomes mega-rich, there are thousands who are exactly as fit who do not.

That is, 2 3 and 4 follow a normal distribution, wealth follows a power-law distribution. The attributes don't correlate strongly.

Makes me feel better to have a study confirm it.

[davidw]

My guess is that it's some kind of distribution curve.

You can certainly improve your odds via 2, 3 and 4, but some people will do all those and end up not doing well. The average person who does them all will end up a bit better-off than average, and some will end up very well off.

In other words, they help, but don't guarantee 'success'.

[moate]

Will they? Wouldn't you need to not only do them, but do them better than average? So it's not just that you need to work hard, it's that you need to be working harder than average. But also if someone was already ahead of you, they could work less than that and still wind up ahead of you.

So now, is it the hard work that determined the end result, or just the luck again?

There are tons of people right now trying really hard to do all sorts of things. Many of them will fail, for a myriad of reasons. That's the idea of "luck". You can't know which reasons will lead to your downfall, because reducing labor and life to "hard work" is so absurdly reductive it's meaningless.

Basically, your individual circumstances are your own and comparing yourself to others might be helpful but it also might not and nobody can definitively tell you one way or the other if luck is even real.

[fredley]

You can't frame things like this without talking about misfortune in the same terms. Lots of things can happen that are 'unluckly', but are vastly skewed to certain demographics. Being unlucky like:

* Receiving little or no schooling

* Having to labour as a child

* Being abused

* Having your primary carers be addicts of some kind

* Growing up in a relatively poor/deprived

* ...

Really this list is endless, and other than blind luck (a lotto win, something that can really elevate you out of this situation, as well as having the sense to use the opportunity correctly), no amount of 'hustle' is really going to get you out of this situation.

The kind of attitude in parent's comment is prevalent amongst people who have grown up in relatively rich, successful environments, and see vastly more lucky people than unlucky people (when in reality there are orders of magnitude more unlucky people than lucky).

[mvaliente2001]

That reminds me a short fictional story by Jorge Luis Borges (if you excuse the quasi non-sequitur): The Lottery in Babylon. It describes how the lottery became so popular in Babylon that they began not just to play for money, but all kind of prizes, and then not only prizes but punishments. Finally, they decided that people didn't even need to buy a ticket. Everybody was implicitly part of the game, where good or bad things could be made to happen to you just by random chance... At the end of the day, The Lottery in Babylon became indistinguishable from normal life.

[ska]

> but they don't define what luck is to begin with.

They do though, the paper is focused on what you call "blind luck" in (1). I suppose it can be summarized as a evidence based counter argument to the cultural narrative weight given to 2,3,4, especially in the US.

I don't think it is complete of course, but it is interesting.

[adventured]

That's a spot on point about the various types of luck. The common derogatory saying about smart / rich (referenced in the title) reveals more about the person saying it, than it does the person that it is directed toward. It's the surface assessment equivalent of thinking someone is rich based on the car they drive (or watch they wear etc.). It's a shallow & easy appraisal that someone runs because they're either incapable of deeper analysis or are too lazy to bother. In my experience it tends to reveal that the speaker knows absolutely nothing about money or wealth.