Luck or Effort?
This is the age of meritocracy.
We're told it's only natural that more opportunity and more wealth should flow to the most capable elites.
Stop anyone on the street and ask whether they'd invest in someone with a track record of success or someone with a track record of failure, and most would probably say they'd back the capable person who has already succeeded.
We all carry the belief that whoever has won before will win again.
The "pragmatism" that keeps surfacing in politics these days, and the "efficiency" that companies love to invoke, are no different. It sounds appealing — focus strategically, raise efficiency, produce results — but what comes attached to it is the strategic allocation of resources, which means backing only the ones who already look like winners.
But are successful people successful because their ability was superior? When we observe an outcome and then reason backward to its cause, we can fall into a fallacy about talent and effort. There's a study worth reading at least once.
Pluchino, A., Biondo, A. E., & Rapisarda, A. (2018). Talent vs luck: The role of randomness in success and failure. Advances in Complex Systems, 21(3–4).
The paper asks why talent follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution while success takes the form of a power law.
Inside a 201 × 201 square, the authors fixed 1,000 individuals whose talent was normally distributed, and let lucky events (green dots, 50%) and unlucky events (red dots, 50%) move at random.
Every individual began with an initial capital of 10. On meeting a lucky event, an individual's capital doubled — but only with a probability equal to their talent; on meeting an unlucky event, capital was halved regardless of talent. The simulation used a time step of six months over an assumed span of 40 years, running for 80 steps in all.
The result: even though talent was normally distributed, after 40 years the capital had collapsed into a Pareto distribution, concentrated to an extreme degree in the hands of a few. The most successful individual had utterly ordinary talent, yet started with a capital of 10 and ended with 2,560. The most talented individual, by contrast, finished with a final capital of just 0.625 — far below the starting capital of 10. We might say this person was born with high intelligence and into a good family, yet was dogged by a relentless chain of bad luck and failure.
Repeating the experiment a hundred times produced the same outcome. The point is this: success takes luck.
So how do we become luckier? Neither good luck nor bad luck is within human control. And yet, if this experiment suggests any way at all of pulling luck toward us, it would be these:
Self-directed effort that raises your talent probability.
Moving into zones with a high density of luck — a market where your talent works, a growing market, a market with more connections.
Widening the count and surface area of your exposure through more attempts.
In the other direction, this is exactly why we should stay humble — and why we should never let ourselves be cowed. Our success was never the work of our effort and strength alone, and our struggles so far were never simply a matter of having no effort or no talent. It may even be worth borrowing the gem of a line from Jeong Il-young, the French teacher everyone's talking about these days: "It's not my fault! Blame someone else."
Luck or Effort?
![Luck or Effort?]()
Reviewed by Dr.Y
on
June 20, 2026
Rating: 5
