Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

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I would add a third category: fortune.

Lot is what you were born with.

Luck is when random things do or don't happen regardless of skill. You can manage it to an extent. Bad luck through being careful and various types of insurance, good luck mostly through participating. Buying bitcoin 3 years ago and selling at great profit now is pure luck. Maybe you influenced the market to grow, probably it was pure luck.

Fortune is the result of stochastic processes. You can do a thing, invest your skill and knowledge, and it can work out or not. Sometimes it works better, sometimes less. For instance, you launch a product that can do between $2k/month and $5k/month and it hits $4.5k/month instead of $2k. That's fortune. Your input affects your chances, but nothing is ever certain.

With time, fortunate events compound and the more often fortune works out for you, the higher your chance that it will continue to do so.

Or as Peter Dinklage says: "I hate that word—’lucky.’ It cheapens a lot of hard work. Living in Brooklyn in an apartment without any heat and paying for dinner at the bodega with dimes—I don’t think I felt myself lucky back then. Doing plays for 50 bucks and trying to be true to myself as an artist and turning down commercials where they wanted a leprechaun. Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people. For some reason I found them, and they found me."

I'd separate hard work into two components:

A. The rewarding part of your craft, e.g. the flow you get into when deeply programming all night. B. The sacrifices your craft requires, e.g. the living in the unheated apartment.

One thing the hard work people forget is that it isn't very impressive to just do type-A enjoyable work for sustained and or even super human periods. Other people would pay for that experience.

I think this separation opens up a few interesting ways of viewing those who are "too lazy" to do the hard work. First, different people flow in different tasks and so even if you gave Peter Dinklage a chance to work for openAI on any project he wanted, he might find it tiring and burn out. This is obvious, but by induction, there's this whole class of school-type activities that many people seem to mentally resist.

Second, there seem to be different expectations on how much of B-type work one has to do in order to get the A-type work they crave. I think people perceived as lazy are those who doubt that almost any amount B-work they contribute will earn them their goal, only more the same. This is excellent when it discourages the average thirteen year old from pursuing pro sports as a career, but I think it also might be the largest reduction to productivity in our economy we have today, as discouraged people tend to lower output and cause problems for their company. And that's only the economic side, the social side of hopelessness and lack of meaning is way worse!

This is a very interesting comment, articulated better than I have been able to explain to others.

I've always been fond of saying showing up to work on time and working your butt off is the low bar to success. All this does is buy you entrance to the ride, and opens up doors of opportunity for you which are worthless unless you take advantage of. Just working hard at some dead-end job 9-5 doesn't get it done, there are millions of people who can successfully do this and get nowhere in life.

Finding someone who understands the 'B' work is by far the most important part of their career is rather rare. I've called the lack of motivation to do this from the vast majority of people "laziness in thought". It's much harder to gain discipline and do well in this part of your career than simply showing up and doing what you're told as well as you can.

It also doesn't help that the school system more or less trains you almost exclusively for the "A" type work, and actively encourages ignoring the "B" and letting someone else handle it for you. This is a very hard attitude to break as taking control of your own path is rather scary.

"Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn." - of course you can't tell people how they should take your comments. But saying that you/he/she was lucky does not negate the fact that they may have worked hard. Saying it was ONLY luck does.

Working hard of course put you in a position where you could gain from the luck. You won't suddenly end up as a world renowned producer if you work as a fireman. You invest in your future with a lot of hard work and then perhaps you are one of those who make it.

A lot of people work hard on whatever they have put their mind into. A lot of people are talented and great at what they do. But a lot of people from both groups never really gets the recognition/success/financial breakthrough as others of similar and perhaps even objectively less hard-working/talented people. They just had a little extra "luck".

That's my whole point. When you position yourself to take advantage of opportunities and it works out, that's fortune. Like building a lottery ticket that wins.

Luck is when it just happens without any hard work. Like buying a lottery ticket that wins.

The Peter Dinklage bit annoys me, as this is precisely the issue - survivorship bias.

I happen to have a few actor friends. All talented, harder working than me, and dedicated to their craft. And no-one is interviewing them because they haven't made it.The talent and hard work pays off because you also get the lucky break.

Exactly. Fuck Peter Dinklage. Even Louis CK is at it - he was so humble for so long, and then when he got really big he started with the "I've put in the time" schtick, and feeling like he deserves it (which he does, but he's not successful because he deserves it)

nit: seems like OP's definition of luck is roughly your definition of fortune. s/fortune/luck/rg in your post and I think you say the same thing.

Creating a new bucket to qualify things that happen regardless of skill seems redundant with the definition of lot. "Lot" in the context of OP's post happens despite skill.

I think there's a difference between lot and luck though. Lot is what you have before, luck is what you get during.

To crib from Warren Buffet [1], imagine a coin flipping contest. Everyone bets $1 and calls the flip of a coin. Miss and you're out. Betting pool is distributed among everyone else.

20 rounds in, there are 215 people with a few hundred thousand dollars made from a $1 investment and some time.

It's pure luck. They weren't even the one flipping the coin so couldn't have influenced the 50:50 chance even if they tried. That's luck.

Fortune is when you both bet and flip the coin and find a technique to influence the flip to be 40:60 in your favor and it works out.

Lot is when your dad gives you $100k to start a business.

[1] http://www.fool.com/investing/value/2010/03/19/warren-buffet...

I agree with your quote but I have to say...

The growing a fortune with bitcoin should be classed as fortune.

If you contributed to the growth of bitcoin, yes. Fortune.

If you were just along for the ride, no. Luck.

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