Why Success Is Not a Matter of Luck (Or Work)
And why people insist that it is.
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel asks the age-old question: is success luck?
While he doesn’t take a clear position, he hints that success is not luck but the result of work achieved toward a specific purpose.
He takes it for proof that successful entrepreneurs are rarely successful once.
If they can build profitable companies repeatedly, they’re likely aware of at least a part of the success recipe.
This assumption, as far as we know, is correct.
But we’re only scratching the surface here.
The reality is a tad more complicated.
Why Luck Is Fashionable
The 15th and 16th centuries saw the idea of equality in front of the law evolving to equality of capabilities.
Rousseau, one of the philosophers having brought forth this principle, wrote that men were the products of their environment which explained the perceived variation in capabilities (also known as “the blank slate”).
Hundreds of books have been written to invalidate this idea but it remained predominant in the progressist circles because both the right and the left thought that…
