The Other Components of Success — Luck
Talent? Deliberate Practice? No, it’s called luck.
The “other Component”
The largely common paradigm of highly competitive cultures is rooted in the belief that success is due to personal qualities. It is in talent, intelligence, skills, smartness, efforts, willfulness, hard work, or risk-taking.
It is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories.
It is very well known that intelligence, talent, and personal qualities are often considered a proxy for success.
Chance events play a much larger role in life than many people once imagined.
Talent and efforts are not enough. You have to be also in the right place at the right time — luck also matters. However, it’s always underestimated because it plays out in subtle ways.
Many books, articles, and other information sources often overrated one component. People’s achievement only happens caused by those components; talent, hard work, crucial events favoring one’s life, etc.
The narrative fallacy leads us to see events as stories with logical chains of cause and effect. Stories help us make sense of the world. However, suppose we’re not aware of the narrative fallacy. In that case, we can believe we understand the world more than we really do.
Duncan J. Watts suggests that narrative fallacy operates with particular force when people observe unusually successful outcomes and consider them necessary for hard work and talent. They mainly emerge from a complex and twisted sequence of steps, each depending on precedent ones. If any of them had been different, an entire career or life trajectory would almost surely differ too.
In his research, Pluchino and his team presented an agent-based model that can quantify the role of talent and luck in people’s careers. An important result of the simulations is that the most successful agents are rarely the most talented ones.
The model shows the importance of lucky events in determining individual success.
Many people are mistakenly considered a measure of competence or talent since rewards and resources are usually given to already succeeded people. It might cause a lack of opportunities for talented ones who not successful yet.
Another result highlights the risks of the paradigm called naive meritocracy. It fails to give honors and rewards to the most competent people because it underestimates randomness among the determinants of success.
The time you born is giving you an advantage
Relative age effects (RAEs) occur when those relatively older for their age group are more likely to succeed. One of the examples happens in Canadian Ice Hockey. In their research, Barnley and Thompson found that nearly 40% of elite junior teams are born in the first quarter of the year. Meaning that they would have been consistently older than their age-group peers.
This event was caused by a factor named selection bias. It means that evaluators (e.g., teachers, coaches) mistakenly grant fewer opportunities to relatively younger individuals than is warranted by their ability.
Deaner and his team explain that selector’s preference for relatively older individuals might be rational, given the selector’s aims and the greater maturity of somewhat older individuals.
For example, a coach selecting a youth team may favor relatively older players because their performance may be evaluated based on their team’s success.
Similarly, a teacher may select mostly relatively older pupils for a gifted academic program because they are most likely to benefit from and contribute to it.
In fact, nowadays, hockey scout evaluations frequently consider the relative age of the scouted player. RAEs in hockey have been recognized as an important consideration since the mid-1990s.
What can we do?
What about people who don’t have the right favorable skill or uncontrollable factors such as age in Canadian hockey? Are people born in the last quarter of the year don’t have a chance of success? — of course not.
Get the most of your strength.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition. You can’t force your way to the top if you don’t have several factors needed for a specific task.
The people at the top of any competitive field are not only well trained, but they are also well suited to the task.
Talent does not determine your destiny, they determine your areas of opportunity.
— James Clear
Are we doing a suitable one?
At the beginning of a new activity, there should be a period of exploration.
As we explore different options, there are a series of questions we can tick off to narrow the areas that will be the most suits us:
- What feels like fun to me, but work to others? — I really like doing research and reading a lot of stuff; discovering things really fulfills me psychologically. Other people might say that researching things is burdensome.
- What makes me lose track of time? — In my case, reading and researching also make me forget that I already spent so much time working.
- Where do I get greater returns than the average person? — returns can be many forms; joy, fulfillment, or maybe money. Don’t need to have all of those three; just one is enough, but if you managed to have all of those, your return is superb.
There are some aspects we can control and some others not. Instead of focusing on what we can't control, prepare ourselves by equipping any things beneficial to our goals. So when the opportunities (or luck) come, we noticed it quickly and then make our way to the top.
Just to make sure we have this mindset that there are no one big factors that immediately leads to people’s success.
It is a chain of events in people’s life that very connected to each other while having so many factors, not just talent, or hard work; there's more than that.
