Exactly
> On Apr 19, 2016, at 5:11 AM, Charles Haynes <charles.hay...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Strongly agree. I'm smart, but my success, such as it is, is more luck than
> skill.
>
> That said - luck favors the prepared, and "the more I practice, the luckier
> I get."
>
> -- Charles
>
>> On Tue, 19 Apr 2016 at 11:18 Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> This strikes a chord. I work with early stage technology entrepreneurs, and
>> have done for over 2 decades (this includes the dot.com boom, a period
>> that
>> has special relevance to this topic) I have come across several people who,
>> through some confluence of circumstances, have made a lot of money. The
>> temptation (including for the people involved) is to imagine this is
>> because they were smart. This is almost certainly not true, as can easily
>> be demonstrated by the fact that there are always many other people who are
>> demonstrably at least as smart who have not succeeded.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Udhay
>>
>>
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luck-matters-more-than-you-might-think/476394/
>>
>> Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think
>>
>> When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and
>> public-spirited.
>>
>> ROBERT H. FRANK MAY 2016 ISSUE BUSINESS
>>
>> I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good
>> fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was
>> playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell
>> psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I
>> complained of feeling nauseated. The next thing he knew, I was lying
>> motionless on the court.
>>
>> He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my
>> chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained
>> to do. He got a cough out of me, but seconds later I was again motionless
>> with no pulse. Very shortly, an ambulance showed up.
>>
>> Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than
>> five miles away. How did this one arrive so quickly? By happenstance, just
>> before I collapsed, ambulances had been dispatched to two separate auto
>> accidents close to the tennis center. Since one of them involved no serious
>> injuries, an ambulance was able to peel off and travel just a few hundred
>> yards to me. EMTs put electric paddles on my chest and rushed me to our
>> local hospital. There, I was loaded onto a helicopter and flown to a larger
>> hospital in Pennsylvania, where I was placed on ice overnight.
>>
>> Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac
>> arrest. Almost 90 percent of people who experience such episodes don’t
>> survive, and the few who do are typically left with significant
>> impairments. And for three days after the event, my family tells me, I
>> spoke gibberish. But on day four, I was discharged from the hospital with a
>> clear head. Two weeks later, I was playing tennis with Tom again.
>>
>> If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead.
>>
>> Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Mike Edwards
>> is no longer alive because chance frowned on him. Edwards, formerly a
>> cellist in the British pop band the Electric Light Orchestra, was driving
>> on a rural road in England in 2010 when a 1,300-pound bale of hay rolled
>> down a steep hillside and landed on his van, crushing him. By all accounts,
>> he was a decent, peaceful man. That a bale of hay snuffed out his life was
>> bad luck, pure and simple.
>>
>> Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that
>> Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. But in other arenas, randomness
>> can play out in subtler ways, causing us to resist explanations that
>> involve luck. In particular, many of us seem uncomfortable with the
>> possibility that personal success might depend to any significant extent on
>> chance. As E. B. White once wrote, “Luck is not something you can mention
>> in the presence of self-made men.”
>>
>> Seeing ourselves as self-made leads us to be less generous and
>> public-spirited.
>> My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck. But it has
>> motivated me to learn much more about the subject than I otherwise would
>> have. In the process, I have discovered that chance plays a far larger role
>> in life outcomes than most people realize. And yet, the luckiest among us
>> appear especially unlikely to appreciate our good fortune. According to the
>> Pew Research Center, people in higher income brackets are much more likely
>> than those with lower incomes to say that individuals get rich primarily
>> because they work hard. Other surveys bear this out: Wealthy people
>> overwhelmingly attribute their own success to hard work rather than to
>> factors like luck or being in the right place at the right time.
>>
>> That’s troubling, because a growing body of evidence suggests that seeing
>> ourselves as self-made—rather than as talented, hardworking, and
>> lucky—leads us to be less generous and public-spirited. It may even make
>> the lucky less likely to support the conditions (such as high-quality
>> public infrastructure and education) that made their own success possible.
>>
>> Happily, though, when people are prompted to reflect on their good fortune,
>> they become much more willing to contribute to the common good.
>>
>> Psychologists use the term hindsight bias to describe our tendency to
>> think, after the fact, that an event was predictable even when it wasn’t.
>> This bias operates with particular force for unusually successful outcomes.
>>
>> In his commencement address to Princeton University’s 2012 graduating
>> class, Michael Lewis described the series of chance events that helped make
>> him—already privileged by virtue of his birth into a well-heeled family and
>> his education at Princeton—a celebrated author:
>>
>> One night I was invited to a dinner where I sat next to the wife of a big
>> shot of a big Wall Street investment bank, Salomon Brothers. She more or
>> less forced her husband to give me a job. I knew next to nothing about
>> Salomon Brothers. But Salomon Brothers happened to be where Wall Street was
>> being reinvented—into the Wall Street we’ve come to know and love today.
>> When I got there I was assigned, almost arbitrarily, to the very best job
>> in the place to observe the growing madness: They turned me into the house
>> derivatives expert.
>> On the basis of his experiences at Salomon, Lewis wrote his 1989 best
>> seller, Liar’s Poker, which described how Wall Street financial maneuvering
>> was transforming the world.
>>
>> All of a sudden people were telling me I was a born writer. This was
>> absurd. Even I could see that there was another, more true narrative, with
>> luck as its theme. What were the odds of being seated at that dinner next
>> to that Salomon Brothers lady? Of landing inside the best Wall Street firm
>> to write the story of the age? Of landing in the seat with the best view of
>> the business? … This isn’t just false humility. It’s false humility with a
>> point. My case illustrates how success is always rationalized. People
>> really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck—especially
>> successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was
>> somehow inevitable.
>> Our understanding of human cognition provides one important clue as to why
>> we may see success as inevitable: the availability heuristic. Using this
>> cognitive shortcut, we tend to estimate the likelihood of an event or
>> outcome based on how readily we can recall similar instances. Successful
>> careers, of course, result from many factors, including hard work, talent,
>> and chance. Some of those factors recur often, making them easy to recall.
>> But others happen sporadically and therefore get short shrift when we
>> construct our life stories.
>>
>> Little wonder that when talented, hardworking people in developed countries
>> strike it rich, they tend to ascribe their success to talent and hard work
>> above all else. Most of them are vividly aware of how hard they’ve worked
>> and how talented they are. They’ve been working hard and solving difficult
>> problems every day for many years! In some abstract sense, they probably do
>> know that they might not have performed as well in some other environment.
>> Yet their day-to-day experience provides few reminders of how fortunate
>> they were not to have been born in, say, war-torn Zimbabwe.
>>
>> Our personal narratives are biased in a second way: Events that work to our
>> disadvantage are easier to recall than those that affect us positively. My
>> friend Tom Gilovich invokes a metaphor involving headwinds and tailwinds to
>> describe this asymmetry.
>>
>> When you’re running or bicycling into the wind, you’re very aware of it.
>> You just can’t wait till the course turns around and you’ve got the wind at
>> your back. When that happens, you feel great. But then you forget about it
>> very quickly—you’re just not aware of the wind at your back. And that’s
>> just a fundamental feature of how our minds, and how the world, works.
>> We’re just going to be more aware of those barriers than of the things that
>> boost us along.
>> That we tend to overestimate our own responsibility for our successes is
>> not to say that we shouldn’t take pride in them. Pride is a powerful
>> motivator; moreover, a tendency to overlook luck’s importance may be
>> perversely adaptive, as it encourages us to persevere in the face of
>> obstacles.
>>
>> And yet failing to consider the role of chance has a dark side, too, making
>> fortunate people less likely to pass on their good fortune.
>>
>> The one dimension of personal luck that transcends all others is to have
>> been born in a highly developed country. I often think of Birkhaman Rai,
>> the Bhutanese man who was my cook when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in
>> Nepal. He was perhaps the most resourceful person I’ve ever met. Though he
>> was never taught to read, he could perform virtually any task in his
>> environment to a high standard, from thatching a roof to repairing a clock
>> to driving a tough bargain without alienating people. Even so, the meager
>> salary I was able to pay him was almost certainly the high point of his
>> life’s earnings trajectory. If he’d grown up in a rich country, he would
>> have been far more prosperous, perhaps even spectacularly successful.
>>
>> Being born in a favorable environment is an enormous stroke of luck. But
>> maintaining such an environment requires high levels of public investment
>> in everything from infrastructure to education—something Americans have
>> lately been unwilling to support. Many factors have contributed to this
>> reticence, but one in particular stands out: budget deficits resulting from
>> a long-term decline in the United States’ top marginal tax rate.
>>
>> A recent study by the political scientists Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels,
>> and Jason Seawright found that the top 1 percent of U.S. wealth-holders are
>> “extremely active politically” and are much more likely than the rest of
>> the American public to resist taxation, regulation, and government
>> spending. Given that the wealthiest Americans believe their prosperity is
>> due, above all else, to their own talent and hard work, is this any wonder?
>> Surely it’s a short hop from overlooking luck’s role in success to feeling
>> entitled to keep the lion’s share of your income—and to being reluctant to
>> sustain the public investments that let you succeed in the first place.
>>
>> And yet this state of affairs does not appear to be inevitable: Recent
>> research suggests that being prompted to recognize luck can encourage
>> generosity. For example, Yuezhou Huo, a former research assistant of mine,
>> designed an experiment in which she promised subjects a cash prize in
>> exchange for completing a survey about a positive thing that had recently
>> happened to them. She asked one group of participants to list factors
>> beyond their control that contributed to the event, a second group to list
>> personal qualities and actions that contributed to it, and a control group
>> to simply explain why the good thing had happened. After completing the
>> survey, subjects were given an opportunity to donate some or all of their
>> reward to charity. Those who had been prompted to credit external
>> causes—many mentioned luck, as well as factors such as supportive spouses,
>> thoughtful teachers, and financial aid—donated 25 percent more than those
>> who’d been asked to credit personal qualities or choices. Donations from
>> the control group fell roughly midway between those from the other two
>> groups.
>>
>> Experiments by David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University,
>> offer additional evidence that gratitude might lead to greater willingness
>> to support the common good. In one widely cited study, he and his
>> co-authors devised a clever manipulation to make a group of laboratory
>> subjects feel grateful, and then gave them an opportunity to take actions
>> that would benefit others at their own expense. Subjects in whom gratitude
>> had been stoked were subsequently about 25 percent more generous toward
>> strangers than were members of a control group. These findings are
>> consistent with those of other academic psychologists. Taken together, the
>> research suggests that when we are reminded of luck’s importance, we are
>> much more likely to plow some of our own good fortune back into the common
>> good.
>>
>> In an unexpected twist, we may even find that recognizing our luck
>> increases our good fortune. Social scientists have been studying gratitude
>> intensively for almost two decades, and have found that it produces a
>> remarkable array of physical, psychological, and social changes. Robert
>> Emmons of the University of California at Davis and Michael McCullough of
>> the University of Miami have been among the most prolific contributors to
>> this effort. In one of their collaborations, they asked a first group of
>> people to keep diaries in which they noted things that had made them feel
>> grateful, a second group to note things that had made them feel irritated,
>> and a third group to simply record events. After 10 weeks, the researchers
>> reported dramatic changes in those who had noted their feelings of
>> gratitude. The newly grateful had less frequent and less severe aches and
>> pains and improved sleep quality. They reported greater happiness and
>> alertness. They described themselves as more outgoing and compassionate,
>> and less likely to feel lonely and isolated. No similar changes were
>> observed in the second or third groups. Other psychologists have documented
>> additional benefits of gratitude, such as reduced anxiety and diminished
>> aggressive impulses.
>>
>> Economists like to talk about scarcity, but its logic doesn’t always hold
>> up in the realm of human emotion. Gratitude, in particular, is a currency
>> we can spend freely without fear of bankruptcy. Indeed, if you talk with
>> others about their experiences with luck, as I have, you may discover that
>> with only a little prompting, even people who have never given much thought
>> to the subject are surprisingly willing to rethink their life stories,
>> recalling lucky breaks they’ve enjoyed along the way. And because these
>> conversations almost always leave participants feeling happier, it’s not
>> hard to imagine them becoming contagious.
>>
>> Copyright © 2016 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
>>
