How much of your success has come from luck?

[innonimatu]

It's a concept in statistics. Suppose you are tossing a coin. You have 50% chance to get head, and 50% chance for tail. Each flip, individually, is quite random. But if you toss the coin for 1,000 times, it's very likely that you get close to 500 heads and 500 tails - the randomness in either way cancells each out. If you get $1 for each head and $0 for each tail, you'd won $500, as if you won a certain $0.5 from each bet. We say the mathematical expectation of this bet is $0.5.

Now suppose you have a 100-face dice, you won $100 when you throws a 100, but each throw costs you $2. You make 100,000 throws. If chances are fair, you'd win 1000 times, or $100,000 in total. The tickets cost you $200,000. So the mathematical expectation would be ($100,000 - $200,000)/1000 = $-0.5. Numbers vary, but it's a rule that the expectation for the average player is negative. That is where bookmaker's profit comes from.

So you just described a game where the same thing is repeated over and over again. Life doesn't happen that way. If anything, you should be arguing about compound probabilities. Your reasoning about probabilities doesn't apply. Bad and good random events in an individual's life do not on average cancel out as you tried to claim, because each event has consequences influencing posterior events. I'm not letting you write off the effect of luck with that argument.

By the way, here is an interesting piece about luck and peoples' wrong perception (denial) of it.
How cognitive illusions blind us to reason

 

[Alassius]

So you just described a game where the same thing is repeated over and over again. Life doesn't happen that way. If anything, you should be arguing about compound probabilities. Your reasoning about probabilities doesn't apply. Bad and good random events in an individual's life do not on average cancel out as you tried to claim, because each event has consequences influencing posterior events. I'm not letting you write off the effect of luck with that argument.

You are absolutely right. Those calculations only apply to something like lottery, where we can assume each drawing is independent from others. I didn't mean to imply life works like that. If it does we'd all be as rich as each other by the time we're 70.

I was talking about two different cases. One is lottery, where good luck and bad luck cancel out each other, and where efforts - the bad kind - of persistence make you lose more. The other one is life, where luck doesn't cancel out each other. Yet any bad luck is unlikely to be insurmountable. With the right kind of efforts you can overcome it. Especially if you start early, before bad luck accumulates too much disadvantage for you.

 

[Tani Coyote]

Any success I enjoy in life will have been a large degree of luck, by merit of having a very hardworking(and business-savvy) father and mother whose only real rules are be responsible with cash and do good in school. I must admit, I don't have much of a work ethic myself, at least not for physical labor. Let's hope to God that invention racks up tons of money so I can spend the rest of my life managing the inheritance.

As for my parents, they have a lot of luck, but a lot of it was also a work ethic. Both were born to very poor families, but my father made a point to hold multiple jobs as soon as legally able while my mother raised my brother. While it's easy to ascribe it to luck, I feel a large part of his success was indeed his own responsibility - he quickly ascended the ranks until he became a regional manager, and well, we've gotten better off ever since.

Where luck really came into play was his decision to quit his job to form his own business. Had it gone under, we'd be in poverty again. We were very lucky there.

Naturally, their success has rose tinted their worldview - my father is quick to call people "lazy," for instance. I think if anything, he's just above average in terms of work ethic. Ah well, it's self-serving terminology. Likewise, my father is quick to hate on "Socialism" and any attempt at wealth distribution. What're you gonna do, though?

My paternal grandparents' success in life is by far their responsibility. They didn't hit it big like my father did, but saved whatever they could each paycheck. As a result, they have a wonderful house, vacation homes in Hawai'i, and go on annual vacations with several of the grandchildren every year. They also are quick to have the latest technology. I like to think of them as a success story all Americans can follow.