When I Win, It’s Skill. When Someone Else Wins, It’s Luck
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Creativity, Ideas, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Self

When I Win, It’s Skill. When Someone Else Wins, It’s Luck

Roll the dice more when the worst that can happen isn’t a big deal

From PIRO4D on Pixabay

The title is a joke in a fantasy football league of my friends from college. Whenever we win on a given week, we talk trash about our skill at starting just the right players. Whenever we lose, we blame it on bad luck and external factors like weather and injuries. Of course, with COVID-19 making the season especially precarious, there are even more factors our fantasy football league can attribute to bad luck.

The facetious attitude is that when we win, it’s skill. But when we lose, our opponents got lucky.

Of course, I don’t believe this attitude outside the realm of fantasy football. It’s simply the dynamic with my friends that make it interesting and entertaining to trash talk.

On a more serious note, as a writer and teacher, it’s easy to fall into the trap of getting jealous and attributing your successes to skill and others to luck. You can think that other teachers teach easier classes and less challenging students.

But the lesson here is clear —most of life is luck. It’s a reality I first started to realize this year, and then start to buy into as a way to cope with realities I faced, my students faced, and more faced that seemed increasingly unfair. It’s a human tendency to attribute our own successes to our own skills and merit, and the accomplishments of others to luck.

Luck is more important than skill. And while most people in western society find that mindset defeating, I find it liberating — I don’t take too much stock in my own successes and think I’m better than people, because I just got luckier. I don’t take my losses and failures as personally as I used — I just got unlucky. And I’m more than willing to take risks and venture out of my comfort zone because luck dictates I have no idea where the outcome is going to go.

Don’t get me wrong — I have a lot of willpower. The problem is that willpower, determination, productivity hacks, and anything else I can credit to my personal attributes only goes so far. It only lasts so long.

As a writer, luck means writing about topics I’ve never written about before because I don’t know how well I’m going to do writing about them, or how much I’m going to enjoy the writing process. Luck means pitching big and dreaming big, and not taking it personally when I get no response from a prominent editor or publication.

According to Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American, the secret to success just might be luck. Kaufman emphasizes that magazines like Success, Forbes, Inc., and Entrepreneur as telling the secrets to success, and that success is all due to personal characteristics like hard work, toughness, optimism, a growth mindset, and emotional intelligence. And that’s not only a part of our values but also how we allocate resources. In the words of Kaufman,

“We tend to give out resources to those who have a past history of success, and tend to ignore those who have been unsuccessful, assuming that the most successful are also the most competent.”

Kaufman is a psychologist, and he spent his whole life studying psychological characteristics that predict creativity and achievement. While he has found many traits that explain differences in success, much more is left unexplained. Kaufman concludes that luck and opportunity play a far greater role in anything than we previously realized. He doesn’t think luck is everything but instead thinks that personal characteristics matter much less than we think, and are more determined by other determinants of success.

Some of these determinants of success are that half of the differences in income of people across the world is explained by the country they’re raised in and the income distribution in their country. Kaufman also notes that scientific impact is randomly distributed, not based on productivity. Also, the chances of being a CEO is often most influenced by your mother’s name or month of birth.

So that begs the bigger question — is all of success just luck? And what would be the implications for whether successful people are just lucky? How would we allocate resources? How would we assess the “potential” of others? The idea of a meritocracy has been discredited enough, and in a 2018 paper by Pluchino et al., the Italian author credited the “toy mathematical model,” which defined talent as the personal characteristics that allowed them to exploit lucky opportunities.

The authors replicated the Pareto Principle, which suggests that a small number of people end up achieving the success of most of the population. The simulation found that talent was equally distributed, but success was not equally distributed. The 20 most successful individuals held 44% of the total success in that study, which is consistent and even an underestimation of how wealth is distributed in the real world.

The authors found that talent isn’t irrelevant to success since people with talent had a greater probability of increasing success. People with more talent could exploit the possibilities offered to them.

But talent is not the most important factor, since the most talented people in the study were often not the most successful. The people most successful had above average talent, but the most luck.

“In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals,” Kaufman says.

Luck ended up being the most important factor in the study.

As a Christian, I believe everything is up to God. At the same time, I believe God controls luck. And God isn’t Santa — He doesn’t just reward you because you believe in him. The “shit just happens” attitude of Robert Frost is one I completely buy into, because the randomness of life makes it so a lot of good people suffer immensely, while people who commit mass genocide gain power. I personally will have to read much more into the theology of luck.

Luck is an unpopular idea in western society, and for good reason. We want to focus on what’s merely within our control. But maybe we need to keep believing in luck, according to the School of Life, despite luck being “a substantial offence against modern ideals of control, strategy, and foresight.” We want to be the authors of our own destinies, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that notion.

Advances in science, medicine, insurance, and education tilt the tide against luck. But luck will never be tamed as an entity. Every success requires a significant amount of luck, and we avoid failure using luck. Think about driving a car — the most dangerous activity most of us do every day. Lord knows how many near accidents each of us has gotten into, how many close calls we’ve had either making risky turns or having other people make risky turns.

People see themselves less as passive actors in the world by day. Personal responsibility is the idea and concept with which we feel the greatest degree of control, and luck often assigns our failures to things outside our control.

But a belief in luck should ground us in humility when we’ve successful, and not blame other people for their circumstances. A belief in luck can help enforce our own sense of compassion and empathy, because no one is to blame for their circumstances. At the same time, a belief in luck means no one else is to blame for our circumstances — there’s a tendency in some circles I’ve been in to blame all our problems on our parents. And while I didn’t have the perfect and picturesque childhood, my problems are my own.

Luck and personal responsibility can co-exist. But doesn’t luck give us the capacity for personal responsibility? We’re lucky that we didn’t get into that accident that nearly ended our lives. We’re lucky for so many things. And just because we’re so lucky doesn’t mean we should be complacent, but rather aim higher and take more risks. Of course, that doesn’t go for all high stakes situations, but situations where there’s really not much to lose.

Roll the dice more when the worst that can happen isn’t a big deal. Apply for that dream job. Pitch that dream publication. Strike that conversation you’re nervous about. Go on that trip. Have some fun. What’s the worst that can happen? We just might get lucky.