Just saying that blaming one’s own or other people’s success on luck will always lead to suboptimal outcomes for the blamer. Good and bad events will happen one way or another, and it’s up to each one of us to make the most of it.
Therefore, if you think luck is the main determinant of outcomes, you’ll try much less hard.
You’re assuming I’m a nihilist and I’m not. I’m going to die, but I don’t kill myself.
In my opinion, if we looked at peoples success and failure as all based on luck, we would be much kinder to each other.
High achievers getting zero credit. Moping losers blaming their failures on “bad luck”. Zero reason to strive for greatness because you’ll get sympathy if you fail and jealousy if you succeed.
No thanks.
Let me tell you how I would see it. High achievers, knowing that they’re successful based on lock would be more helpful to people who didn’t have good luck. This would turn out to be a more stable and even society.
I guess you like the separation of wealth we’re experiencing right now?
Everyone gets a steady stream of good luck and bad luck. Consistently sailing upstream towards success takes a lot of grit and determination, something completely lacking in the minds of those who think they’re at the mercy of their circumstances.
I’ve been helped by many, deserved and undeserved.
But to remove the role of agency from success is an overreaction.
The extreme right says life is a perfec meritocracy. The extreme left says it’s all down to luck and power dynamics. As usual, they are both wrong and it’s a healthy mix of both.
But since agency is the only thing you control, it’s best to focus on that.
Viktor E. Frankl
He would say he was lucky.
Viktor Frankl is an amazing example of someone taking an absolutely shit situation and applying some agency to it to make it better. My entire point is even he had good and bad luck, and chose not to focus on that, but on his zone of control, his agency.
If it is in fact your contention that Viktor Frankl - Viktor Frankl - was lucky, then there's really no point in any further discussion.
I’m not demeaning his agency everything is written but if he wasn’t lucky, we wouldn’t be able to read anything he wrote about his experience.
A man in the most unlucky circumstances looked for the ways in which he was indeed lucky, and then went on to turn that into a good outcome.
Pure agency. Luck had nothing to do with it.