I am lucky

If there is one thing that I was very sceptical about for the past 20 years then it was luck. I never believed in luck and always believed that success is a byproduct of smart decisions and hard work. Then I started following Taleb and start reading his books.

Taleb in “Fooled by randomness” says

[W]e often have the mistaken impression that a strategy is an excellent strategy, or an entrepreneur a person endowed with “vision,” or a trader a talented trader, only to realize that 99.9% of their past performance is attributable to chance, and chance alone. Ask a profitable investor to explain the reasons for his success; he will offer some deep and convincing interpretation of the results. Frequently, these delusions are intentional and deserve to bear the name “charlatanism.”

According to Taleb, randomness or luck plays a very important role in anyone’s success. All the successful people can look back and pick events or decisions that contributed to success as if they were planned. Those are narrative fallacies at best.

Then I started reading Outliers. Malcolm Gladwell argued passionately for the environment’s role in the success and the concept of luck slowly started creeping into my head.

He says

“All the outliers we’ve looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule.”

The final nail in the coffin is when I start reading “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. No one can categorically prove the role of luck in success than him. He argues that the most intelligent people are prone to failures than the less intelligent ones. The most intelligent ones are overconfident about their skills and less aware of the role of luck in their success and that overconfidence plots their failure.

“Both in explaining the past and in predicting the future, we focus on the causal role of skill and neglect the role of luck. We are therefore prone to an illusion of control. We focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know, which makes us overly confident in our beliefs.”

After reading this book, I understand how there are so many events that secretly conspire for our success. There are so many factors that decide the outcome of our lives and we are not even aware of those, forget we controlling it.

Even Warren Buffett, Oracle of Omaha says “I was born lucky”

“Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, “One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one that is born in the United States?” It says something about the fact that society has something to do with your fate and not just your innate qualities. The people who say, “I did it all myself,” and think of themselves as Horatio Alger — believe me, they’d bid more to be in the United States than in Bangladesh. That’s the Ovarian Lottery.”

But we can’t also deny the fact that the person who aspires to become successful are mostly lucky. They work so hard, try out so many things and fail more times than others. They are just better prepared to face the opportunities than others.

People will be more humble if they realise that their intelligence and hard work are not the only reasons for their success. So, if you are successful and if others attribute it to luck, don’t frown but smile. After all, that’s true.