I really enjoy reading Morgan Housel's writings around the psychology and behavioural aspects of money. One of the topics he's written about a few times and discussed over the last few months while promoting his new book is the impact of luck and chance on success and failure.
In a
blogpost, he writes about how it's difficult to quanitify how much luck plays into success and failure. And because it's hard to quantify, it's kind of rude to suggest that someone's success is owed to luck so the influence of luck is often ignored. And conversely, when analyzing why businesses failed, investments didn't pan out, and careers got stuck in neutral, it would be a mistake to just think all are solely because of lack of effort, lack of good analysis, and laziness. Just to quote one paragraph which I feel encapsulates it:
People’s lives are a reflection of the experiences they’ve had and the people they’ve met, a lot of which are driven by luck, accident, and chance. The line between bold and reckless is thinner than people think, and you cannot believe in risk without believing in luck, because they are two sides of the same coin. They are both the simple idea that sometimes things happen that influence outcomes more than effort alone can achieve.
While discussing his book on a number of podcasts, another example Morgan gives is how Bill Gates attended one of the few schools in the US at the time to have a computer. Would there be a Microsoft if he didn't attend that school and had the environment to develop his affinity to computing? Or what would have been if his best friend at the time, who was apparently just as smart and more business savvy, wasn't killed in an alpine accident in his late teens?
A personal example is that I put myself in a position to be selected for some international consulting projects my megacorp won. But how would my career (and savings) have gone if my company didn't want to pursue international projects, which in fact happened a few years later?
The point is, yes, we consciously do things to put ourselves in a better position to succeed, but I would not completely discount serendipity, chance, and circumstance. If someone deems my success as due to luck, personally, I wouldn't feel completely offended because I appreciate that a lot of random things have gone my way.
We also don't have complete and perfect information. People make the best decisions they can with the info they have. And unfortunately, sometimes the variables in the equations don't play out as expected.