From Rags to Riches: How Luck Plays a Vital Role in Achieving Success

The Reliance on Luck

Bing AI

‍No one wants to believe luck is a primary driver of success since this notion invites a sense of futility. Why put out effort if luck decides your fate? Most of you likely see beyond this futility in the common wisdom that voices, “You can’t succeed if you don’t play.” Most people abide by this advice, believing even if they fail, they will fall somewhere close to their original goal, but often their effort becomes detrimental, landing them in a worse place than they started. Yet, all success appears difficult, requiring months and years of hard work, dedication, and perseverance. Have you considered how much success depends on luck? By exploring the role of luck in achieving success and how it intertwines with hard work, we can develop a better perspective and make better decisions.

Defining Success & Luck

Years ago, I met a guy who won the lotto when he was in his fifties. Before he won, he barely scraped by with a low-pay job, yet believed he was a success story. During this time, I was opening a company and working many hours, to which he encouraged me by saying, “You just got to keep at it. That hard work will pay off.” As things turned out, my hard work didn’t pay off after losing a lot of money on that business, and eventually, he ended up in worse financial condition than before he won the lotto.

Before we delve into the relationship between luck and success, we need to define these terms. Success means different things to different people. For some, it may be financial prosperity, while for others, it may be personal fulfillment or happiness, and for others, it is just having money to do what they want.

Luck, on the other hand, is often defined as an event that occurs by chance and without any control on our part. It is often associated with good fortune and positive outcomes. However, despite people using the phases interchangeably, “good luck” and “good fortune” differ subtly in meaning.

Good luck relates to chance or randomness, while good fortune pertains to “prosperity attained partly through luck” or one’s journey through life with regard to luck (good and bad). Most importantly, fortune often refers to a divine actor or fate that causes conditions to be lucky or unlucky, implying some external force.

These differences in meaning impact our view of luck in many ways. If you view luck in terms of fortune, you release part, if not all, control to whatever external forces you believe guide luck. People voice this belief in diversely, with one of the most common being, “Everything happens for a reason.” This adage implies the person believes some force: fate, the universe, God, etc., has predestined events in life. As such, this person is likely to make poor decisions based on the inherent belief that they are following some path charted towards a positive goal.

This thinking becomes mired in complexity, in which believers attempt to account for contradictions and logical issues, such as discounting free will. Ultimately, if everything happens for a reason, then it would be a safe assumption that something leads us to some fate, which can also create a sense of futility unless you introduce some element of choice. Choices naturally solve this problem by making circumstances contingent on our decision-making: choose correctly, and good things happen; choose wrong, and bad things happen. This example is one of many that confuse fortune with luck. Entire religions are constructed on this thinking with notions such as karma, do unto others, or spiritual concepts like every event is a lesson intended to teach someone.

Ultimately, confusing luck with fortune instills a false view of circumstance and leads to bad decision-making, especially regarding effort or hard work.

Is success purely luck or hard work?

The debate over success resulting from luck or hard work has raged for a long time. Some argue success is solely based on hard work, while others believe luck plays a significant role.

Those who believe success depends solely on hard work argue luck is just an excuse for those who haven’t put in the effort. They assume if you work hard enough, success is guaranteed. The problem arising from this thinking is many people work hard and do not achieve success. Worse yet, because they believe that effort, or the correct kind of hard work, will achieve success, this leaves no one to blame but themselves. Even more problematically, one who thinks this way is the same person who thinks of luck as fortune, meaning that they are attempting to modify their effort, double down on it, or vary their practices in some way to place them on the correct road to success. People do this their entire lives and never achieve their desires because they constantly shift their work effort with some invisible plan that promises them success.

Oppositely, those who believe luck plays a significant role argue that even the hardest-working individuals can fail without a stroke of luck. They believe luck opens doors and provides opportunities, not possible through hard work alone. Much evidence supports this thinking, such as thousands of actors and actresses moving to LA and never achieving a prosperous career in entertainment.

Those achieving success are often viewed as receiving a “lucky break” or, more accurately, a stroke of luck that leads to significant success. For example, a musician discovered by a record label executive while playing a small gig at a local bar becomes a lucky break, leading to a record deal and eventually worldwide success. While the lucky break can be life-changing, it often requires hard work and dedication to create the opportunity for it to occur. The musician needed to work long hours, tour relentlessly, and constantly improve their craft for the lucky break to happen. As stated earlier, seeing life through the lens of luck can develop into futility and apathy, thus making success impossible for not even trying.

The Role of Luck in Achieving Success

There is no definitive answer to the role of luck in achieving success, as different fields and situations differ in the degrees of luck involved. The role of luck further muddles in the incorrect definition of luck and the subjective view of success. If you think winning the lotto resulted from years of being broke and working hard, this nonsense explains why you worked hard and were broke for so long.

However, luck, not fortune, plays an integral role because bad luck can strike and destroy effort placed into a goal, such as a debilitating illness like MS destroying a career. Another perspective is that absolute success is luck, but relative success is choices and habits, meaning the more extreme the success, the more luck plays a role, but the more moderate the success, the more choice and habit matter. For example, becoming a billionaire may depend largely on luck, but becoming a millionaire may depend largely on choices and habits.

As shown, luck and success are correlated but not causally related, meaning luck does not directly cause success but creates opportunities for success that still require hard work, skill, and persistence to exploit. For example, being born into a wealthy family may be lucky, but it does not guarantee success unless one also works hard, develops skills, and pursues goals.

We could say the role of luck depends on how we measure success, perceive luck, and respond to opportunities and challenges. Yet there is a final component to success, often overlooked, despite its direct relation to luck — and that is risk. The more extreme your vision of success, the more chances you must take to achieve, thereby increasing the need for luck. Still, even if your goal of success is low, you can be thwarted by bad luck. Within this framework, luck (good or bad) can be seen as universal in all endeavors to achieve success.

You can increase luck by networking, placing yourself in the right situations, and working towards your goal with a correct perception of luck, but you are still dependent on luck. This dependency or lack of dependence often derails goals by creating poor decision-making.

Overcoming the fear of relying on luck for success

Many individuals fear relying on luck for success. They believe hard work is the only way to achieve their goals. However, it is important to remember luck can provide opportunities hard work alone cannot. So this means you must try to maximize luck, in the various ways stated already, and rely on luck.

In the reliance on luck, fear arises, perhaps not even consciously but by luck’s perception through upbringing and culture, which makes us uncomfortable with ideas like lack of control and randomness determining outcomes. More comforting is the notion of self-determination or fortune that guides us to success. A sense of stability arises in this thinking because we look to those who are successful, and many say “hard work is the answer,” reinforcing our trust in effort equalling success, or, “everything happens for a reason” gives us hope we are on the right road. Instead, these ideas create faulty decision-making and poor choices because we operate on incorrect assumptions rather than facing the fear of luck.

To overcome the fear of relying on luck for success, we should focus on strengths and skills. We should work hard to develop talents and, most importantly, take risks that require the unique application of those talents since those talents give us an advantage. For example, in the eighties, I knew a lady who owned a jewelry business she ran from her home. Having a lot of knowledge about jewelry, she created unique designs that sold well. She wanted to expand, but the cost of a storefront held tremendous risk, so she opted to rent space inside a luxury hair salon. This option proved successful because she had low overhead. Eventually, she partnered with the salon owner and expanded to multiple salons. Had she opened a storefront, even right next door to the salon she rented space in, the same outcome may not have occurred. The salon owner might have dismissed her business as a bad idea by judging it against the higher overhead of a store or for a million other reasons. Had she thought fortune favored her, she might have gone with a storefront, but instead she made the best decision possible and waited on luck to favor her. The point: we depend on luck, and decision-making needs to be clear with the idea that luck plays a role, and we need to be ready for luck’s opportunities to capitalize on them.

Much wisdom gleans from knowing our dependency on luck. We strive but assume nothing about the outcome of success. Believing there is no luck, karma, or some other magical thinking will keep you trapped, pouring effort into a bad decision. Likewise, believing success is determined only by luck will instill the same bad decision-making because you miss the vital roles of effort, circumstance, and other factors dependent on effort. Good luck is necessary, and bad luck unavoidable, so just be ready to face or enterprise on that luck.