Is success pure luck?

Is success pure luck?

David Gonzales, a 31-year-old man had just bought a house for $10,000. While David was renovating his house, he found something very interesting behind his wall.  After a few minutes of digging, he extracted the object. It was the original copy of Action comic’s debut of Superman.

The original action comic [Image credits: Getty Image]

When auctioned, the comic sold for a price of $175,000 dollars. That is almost 18 times the price of the house he had bought. David Gonzales was what some people would describe as “insanely lucky”.

But sometimes luck can be highly against us. Elizabeth Smith was reading a book on the bottom floor of her 3-floored house, when a football sized meteoroid hit her stomach. She died instantly. The chances of a meteoroid passing through your 3-floored-house and somehow managing to hit you is almost improbable. Statically speaking, it is around 1 in 10 billion. This means that you have more chance of rolling a 6 on a six-sided dice 156 times in a row than getting hit by a meteoroid. Elizabeth Smith was what some people would describe as “insanely unlucky”.

Both David Gonzales and Elizabeth Smith were on two extreme spectrums of luck.  This brings us to the question of: Is success pure luck?

Luck comes in various forms.

One form of luck is where you are born.

You have a much higher chance of being successful if you were lucky enough to be born in a first world country. For example, 26 out of the top 30 richest people are born and bought up from a developed country. Where you are born comes as an essential role in success.  Developed countries offer better education and more options for an individual to succeed. Both Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckenburg have confessed that where they were born (an act of luck) played an essential role in their success.

Another form of luck is getting opportunities, friends that help you succeed or/and just being in the right place at the right time.

Steve Jobs was one of the founders of Apple. Some people think of him as a person who was “revolutionary” for the digital world. Yet the brains behind Apple should also be credited to a person who goes unacknowledged by many people: Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs might have had the visions of what the first computer should do. But it was Steve Woznick who actually created the first computer. I am sure that many others also had visionary ideas about computers, but they were just unlucky to not have a friend who could carry out their idea. Steve Jobs was a genius and his work was revolutionary, but how different would his life have been if he did not have a friend by the name of Steve Wozniak?

Of course, without hard work you can never achieve success. Yet, luck is that something that makes some people successful and some people not. How do we gain luck? Nobody knows. Does that mean that we should not work hard and blame our failures on bad luck? Never. What we must always remember is that luck might make us highly successful. But we have no control over luck. What we do have control over is our effort.  As Thomas Jefferson once said “I find that the harder I work the more luck I seem to have”.