The Role Of Blind Luck In Your Success & How To Maximize It!
Some things in life truly do come down to lucky factors outside of your control
Introduction
We’ve all met someone or had moments in our life where we’ve been “Lucky”, maybe our hard work paid off for a promotion over our peers who were also hard workers. You met your soul mate on a chance encounter in an unlikely place, or perhaps you had a lucky break playing sports and were in the right place at the right time to catch the game winning pass just before the clock ran out.
We feel great in these moments, and we might even feel like our hard work, preparations, and willingness to put ourselves out there gave us the edge to get our lucky break. We like to feel in control of our destiny and that we have a hand in these moments of brilliance
“The guy who is willing to hustle the most is going to be the guy that just gets the loose ball”
-Will Smith
Generally this is true I wrote in my article The Formula For Luck that Luck = (Preparation + Opportunity) x Action
Now there are 2 parts of this equation we can control
Preparation – The hard work everyone talks about in success, making sure you have the tools to capitalize on the opportunities that come your way
Action - The more action you take the more likely preparation has to meet opportunities
However there is that pesky 3rd detail! OPPORTUNITY
Opportunity is something we don’t always have control of and is largely circumstantial, while action can give you more exposure to the opportunities to potential opportunities in your life, they cannot create opportunities out of thin air. It is a fact of life that some enviorments have more opportunities than others and this is largely out of our control.
This article is about recognizing what types of opportunities are largely outside of our control and more importantly learning to recognize what opportunities may be in our life that aren’t available to others so we can leverage them. After all what good are opportunities if we don’t act on them? If we just sit on our butts and watch them walk right on by?
What Is Blind Luck?
Blind Luck is simply the opportunities you are afforded due in no part to skill or action on your part. Many times these forms of opportunities are a birth right such as where you were born, who your parents were, the abilities you were naturally given, and even the year you were born.
Some examples of blind luck in my life are
I was born in America (5% chance)
I had a stable family growing up (62%)
My parents raised me in an area with top schools (10%)
I have an IQ of 130 (2.2%)
Born in digital age (10% ?)
These are all examples of factors that are largely out of my control. I was very lucky indeed based on the numbers above I had about a 0.000682% chance of being born in united states, with an above average IQ, to stable parents, who lived in an area of the country with above average schools.
Now you could argue that not all of the factors above are necessary in my success in todays society. I could have been successful as a female, or even being a country other than America for that matter.
While this is true, it is undeniable that the opportunities afforded to me are significantly different than someone living in a small village back in 1400 BC.
In fact my “Blind Luck” factors are extraordinarily good, Something I came to appreciate more after reading the great book The Phycology Of Money. Which has a great section about the role of luck in the life and success of Bill Gates was born with.
I may not have had the same interest in computers as he did or the advantage of going to school at the dawn of the PC but it’s amazing how closely my luck factors stack up to someone who was once the world’s richest person.
These luck factors have also allowed me to overcome some of my natural short comings like my blindness through tools available today such as Uber, and accessibility tools for computer that simply weren’t available to people even 20 years ago.
What Is Tough Luck?
Normally we think of “Blind Luck” in a positive context. “That was just blind luck that he was neighbors with the owner of Tesla” Tough luck is Just the other side of the coin.
Maybe you were born too early for your natural talents to be of much use, or too late to maximize your skills properly. Or simply born in an area where your skills can’t be fully recognized, such as a child who is exceptionally gifted in math in a war torn country where they’ll never get to study theoretical physics and change the world.
Some examples of tough luck might be
Born too early/ late for your skills
Born to a bad neighborhood
Health issues (Mental or physical)
No access to internet (40% of world)
Lacking strong family support
Born to a persecuted group (look at the Jews in WWII)
While you can argue with cherry picked examples that these aren’t actually limiting factors or tough luck and they can be overcome just look at “Insert rags to riches story of choice here” what most people fail to realize is of the BILLIOINS of people in this world there will be exceptions to these rules, and that’s a wonderful thing. But the laws of statistics still apply.
We hear about the amazing rags to riches stories because they are truly exceptional and inspiring examples of what the human spirit is capable of overcoming. To be clear I have tremendous success for people in this category such as Casey Neistat, Mark Wahlberg, Walt Disney & J.K. Rowling just to name a few. Unfortunately they aren’t the normal outcome for billions of people. Additionally these stories often overlook the role of dumb luck, extraordinary skill, or another contributing factors to the individuals success or simply ignoring some simple truths that don’t fit the brand that individuals wishes to covey to the public.
What Is Dumb Luck?
Before moving onto how to recognize the blind luck in your life I’d like to highlight for a moment the difference between blind luck and dumb luck.
For the purposes of this discussion Blind Luck represents factors you simply cannot change in your life, such as the year you were born, the color of your skin, or the country your parents chose to raise you. This is sort of like the board game you’re given in life to play with.
Dumb luck represents a lucky break someone gets in life such as winning the lottery or reading about something that leads to an action that is fortuitus, such as reading about a professor who is speaking at a local school who later becomes your mentor.
Normally dumb luck involves an action such as buying a lotto ticket that requires no skill but ends up being a lucky break. Or an inaction such as not boarding the Titanic on its maidan voyage because you missed the boarding time. I like to think of dumb luck as the types of cards we draw in the game that life gives us.
You still need to play these cards well of course, just look at the many sad examples of lotto winners who win millions only to lose it all!
Blind Luck In Your Life
OK here we are you’ve learned about the Formula For Luck and what Blind Luck is. So what can you do with this information?
Well quite a lot. Simply realizing you have opportunities that others do not. Means you are in a unique and privileged position to leverage them to your advantage. If you aren’t seeing results it’s probably due to a lack of action.
Also it’s important to keep perspective a day of “Bad Luck” in your life like losing $10K in a bad day on the markets is actually a symptom of all the good luck you’ve had in life. Many people don’t even have $10K to lose due to the life circumstances they were born into. I know this sounds a bit happy go lucky but the fact that you are even able to read this article on your phone or computer over a wireless internet connection puts you in a very elite category! Many people would be extremely envious to be in your shoes. I don’t point that out to shame you but to spark a raging fire in you! You have a huge opportunity to do something with that many people never will! Why are you sitting there doing nothing! Grab this bull by the horn and make something happen!!
Warren Buffet - Credit: https://fortune.com/2016/09/20/warren-buffett-success/
The Role Blind Luck Has In Extreme Success
I want to wrap this article up by highlighting an interesting example of extreme success that had an extraordinary amount of Blind Luck. Warren Buffett. truly hd an extraordinary amount of luck in his life. There are many other great examples but due to Warren’s old age (92 years young) we can see just how lucky he was over his lifetime.
Warren Buffet: Born August 30th 1930 as a white male in United States
US Dollar became a world currency in 1944 when he was 14
Warren Buffets dad was a stock broker, and a US House representative
Was rejected from Stanford which lead to him studying at Columbia where he learned from his mentor Benjamin Graham
Had relatives willing to invest significant amounts of money in him in his early 20’s as an unproven broker.
Now this isn’t to rag on Warren he’s the first to admit he was born into privilege, and was uniquely positioned to capture a large share of the profits to be made as the US economy quickly grew and matured into the power house it is today.
He was simply playing the cards he was dealt as skillfully as he possibly could just like the rest of us. He just happened to have some blind luck that placed him at the right table at the right time, with the right board game, then some dumb luck to give him some very nice cards to work with. He also worked very hard to make the most of these opportunities he was afforded but no amount of hard work can possibly explain the extreme outcome of his life. In fact there are many people in this world who have worked far harder and have very little to show for it.
Warren admits he is very lucky
How To Maximize Blind Luck In Your Life
So to come full circle we know The Formula For Luck that Luck = (Preparation + Opportunity) x Action and Opportunity is the factor we have the least control over. There are a few things you can do to improve your odds of being lucky in life
List out what ways you are lucky, what opportunities do you already have that aren’t available to others, are you taking action on them? Remember all the opertunity in the world doesn’t do you much good if you don’t take action and let them walk right by every day.
Identify if you are in an opportunity rich environment. An example of this would be a 19-year-old on a college campus. Are you surrounding yourself with the right people and taking action to allow opportunity to find you?
Have you properly prepared in order to take advantage of the opportunities when they present themselves? Remember Bill Gates already had the skills he needed in basic computing when he saw the opportunity to launch a software company.
Lean into what’s working! Too many people have their eyes on the next “shiney thing” instead of recognizing what lucky break they have right in front of them.. if something is already going well for you what can you do to 10X that opportunity you already have a competitive advantage in?
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