“Twenty years ago, I dropped dead on the tennis court. I actually suffered cardiac death,” says Robert Frank, matter-of-factly. “These courts were a long way from anywhere. And the only reason I didn’t [actually] die was because there happened to have been an auto accident near the courts while I was playing, and an ambulance had been dispatched to that. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have survived. I don’t think I had given too much thought to the role of luck in life before then, but that seemed too much of a lucky break to ignore”.
Indeed, Frank, professor of economics at Cornell University and author of Success and Luck, would go on to give it serious thought, notably with regard to achievement. What’s true, he contends, is that successful people—rising to the top of their profession—nearly always have talent and put in the hard work. “The problem we often fail to recognise is that there are a lot of people who are just as talented and just as hard-working but who don’t have that modicum of luck,” he says.
We have a strange relationship with luck, which might be defined as the random events of some consequence, or thought of as broadly synonymous with chance, even if, when that’s felt strongly, we prefer to call it luck. For some—western cultures especially—it’s ambivalent, acknowledged when winning a lottery, or meeting one’s partner, less so when getting that promotion. For other cultures, luck is a quasi-superstitious causal, Jedi-like force: something out there in the world, to be believed in, hoped for, manipulated through charms, magical thoughts or quirky habits.
Indeed, even as the same people would reject similar superstitious beliefs as irrational, luck, it seems, is for most of us deemed worthy of our suspension of disbelief at least on occasion. Luckis a kind of shared religion, even among atheists.
“I think what we find most unnerving about luck is the lack of control [it implies],” says Michael Sauder, professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, one of several scientists who has led the new study of luck over recent years and one who argues that, if we could only dig down deep enough, we’d get to the social causes or processes that account for the outcomes we call lucky, or unlucky.
“It’s not just the lack of control. We can’t see when luck happens either,” he adds. “You get a job but don’t know luck’s part in that—some other candidate being ill that day, for example. Or don’t get a job, because your resume got lost. Being oblivious to how luck works is one reason why we so often don’t acknowledge it”.
Or, rather, we don’t want to acknowledge it when it seems to undermine our own efforts. So-called attribution bias has us ready to take credit for successes that are not entirely our own and blame forces beyond our control for our failures. That’s a phenomenon that appears to be particularly acute in business. As the writer EB White once noted, “Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men”.
Certainly, they would no doubt blanch if they found themselves seated at dinner next to Chengwei Lui, associate professor of strategy and behavioural science at Imperial College Business School, London, and a man who has also suffered a near-fatal heart attack, in the company of someone who knew what to do, and while at the gym rather than alone at home. “That was just a random pairing of events that gave me a second chance,” he insists, “even if I sometimes think of it as my ‘lucky escape’”.
Back in 2021, he made a study of 50 firms whose CEOs had been acclaimed in the best-selling business books of the previous decade. Sixteen of those businesses had failed within five years of publication; 23 more underperformed the S&P 500 Index. Chengwei’s argument was not that the CEO’s exceptional talent or effort had suddenly evaporated, but that they had been lucky—rather than exceptional—to start with. And their luck had changed.
Chengwei’s investigations further suggest that the reluctance to concede that luck gave a leg-up is particularly acute among the managerial classes, as opposed to among entrepreneurs—perhaps because they’re already secure in their success. This reluctance was one reason why, in 2018, Italian physicists Andrea Raspiscarda and Alessandro Pluchini, with economist Alessio Biondo, sought to develop a computer model to demonstrate once and for all that luck’s effect is real. Their model simulated the evolution of careers of a large population over 40 years. Each “agent” in the model was given a different degree of “talent” and then, every six years in the simulation, randomly exposed to lucky events—which doubled their success proportional to their talent rating—or unlucky events, which halved it.
The model revealed that while half of the population didn’t advance in their success at all, the 20 most successful agents held 44 per cent of the total success. In other words, talent was definitely important, but on its own wasn’t enough to climb the greasy pole. Mediocre but lucky agents advanced more than talented but unlucky ones. “There are lots of people out there who have worked enormously hard but who haven’t been successful,” as Richard Branson has conceded. “Luck certainly plays a part in it”.
“I think what we find most unnerving about luck is the lack of control [it implies],” says Michael Sauder, professor of sociology at the University of Iowa
And yet, as Benjamin Lough, professor of business administration at the University of Illinois, US, notes, there is sometimes still the strange denial of any role for luck. Even—maybe especially—among those self-evidently advantaged in ways for which no personal credit can be taken. That’s through everything from their genetics to gender, race to education and family circumstances—research that shows less able, richer children are 35 per cent more likely to become high earners than their brighter, poorer peers, even their country of birth. Around half of the differences in income across people globally are explained by their country of residence.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, people of lower socioeconomic status—those least advantaged through circumstance, who work hard and yet still might feel like they get nowhere—are more inclined to think of luck as some external force, holding them back or pushing them forward according to its whims. The privileged, meanwhile, grow up feeling more in control of their circumstances—and their luck.
Indeed, even the smallest unbidden differences between us can matter, statistically at least: the average Fortune 500 CEO is 2.5 inches taller than the average American man; those with names earlier in the alphabet are more likely to receive tenure at a top university… In short, all manner of resources that push us ahead are unfairly distributed. Some of us are born lucky.
Lough, and Michael Sauder, both worry that a reluctance to recognise the role of luck is a product of, and also serves to underpin, the prevailing and, for many nations, foundational ideology of meritocracy—one that frames opportunity as equally available for all to capitalise on through on talent and hard work, with high achievers seen as almost superhuman in their application of both, as opposed to framing outcomes as dependent on talent and hard work but also luck.
“I think we could design institutions [that mitigate for luck], but we don’t because we don’t really want to think of it as having relevance. There’s a wilful blindness or ignorance or lack of humility [in not acknowledging its role]. It takes a degree of self-delusion not to see it,” says Lough, who has analysed almost 200 interviews on the popular NPR podcast How I Built This to see how businesspeople explain their success.
“Successful people often don’t recognise their privilege—or don’t conceive that as being luck,” he adds. “The fact is that how a culture talks about luck reveals what it fears losing control over—and here in the US notably we want to assume people make their own successes [in part because] it raises the questions of what we owe each other in a world where we understand that luck does play its part, and how much of justice is about the redistribution of luck. Most Americans prefer to embrace that ‘self-made’ story, especially in business”.
Maybe that is not surprising. In a 2015 Cornell University psychological study, subjects in a test were given a card game to play, the winning of which was by chance alone. Still, the winners took credit for their win. Making it explicit that it was a game of chance did not change this response. A similar experiment saw subjects randomly assigned the title of either “clerk” or “manager”. They were later asked to score each other on traits such as intelligence and leadership, based on zero evidence. Not only did clerks rate managers better at almost everything, but so did the managers.
On the other hand, maybe the tide is shifting. Research into the perception of luck by Dafna Goor, assistant professor of marketing at London Business School, UK, finds that, perhaps as a consequence of the increased commitment society now has to inclusivity, the successful are now more likely to point out the luck they have had. Maybe this is a form of envy appeasement, because they want to better relate to the listener. In private, they may be much more generous in their self-assessment.
Consider that what we think of as being random (and humans, designed as we are to see patterns, are pretty bad at understanding randomness at the best of times) is rather just the playing out of inevitability, with one event leading inexorably to another, to another, to another, through all time and across a vast interconnected web of happenings.
The twist? You might imagine that the nod to good luck would be reassuring—if luck is random, I might get a break too!—much as recognising your own bad luck may also be an adaptive response to make you try again, rather than concluding that your talent and hard work had peaked and yet were not enough. But you’d be wrong.
“A majority of listeners actually don’t want to hear the successful point out the role luck has played. They want to know how to make it. They want to be motivated, to know what the secret sauce [of success] is,” she explains. “It’s not helpful to tell them that luck plays a part. To suggest that ‘I’m up here and you’re down there, and that’s down to luck’ is to suggest a fixed society, one that we can’t change through our own efforts”.
While the psychological phenomenon of survivorship bias—the idea that those still around must have done something right to still be around—strongly plays against a belief in the role of good luck in our successes, too, it can nonetheless seem that our superficially meritocratic society is all the keener to blame those who haven’t risen. The philosopher Alain de Botton has pointed out that we used to refer to those below our station in life as “unfortunates”—a recognition that they had enjoyed less luck than we had, not that they hadn’t tried hard enough. Now we live by clichés, the likes of ‘fortune favours the bold’ and “you make your own luck”.
Goor reckons there is some truth in these, though: that random opportunities can better be capitalised on by those who are most ready to do so; that those opportunities will more likely come to those who are aware of and attentive to their possibility: “chance favours the prepared mind,” as noted Louis Pasteur, the scientist who discovered penicillin, by chance. “It’s the difference between going out into the world and just sitting there hoping it will come to you,” Goor suggests. But others take a harder line.
“The socially accepted explanation for people who are not successful is that they have become victims of disadvantage. The victim mentality is widespread today: ‘I am not successful in my career, or I have some other problems—then I blame others, or external circumstances [like luck],” argues Rainer Zitelmann, historian and author of The Wealth Elite and a paper published last year on popular perceptions of the rich. “I believe that people who always blame external circumstances, or who claim they are not successful because they didn’t have any luck, are deceiving themselves and harming themselves
“I have never in my life met anyone who always had only good luck or only bad luck,” he adds. “For most people, it balances out over the years. And even people who have experienced a lot of misfortune, for example, in having a disability, can be extremely successful if they have the right mindset”.
Having the mindset that you can make your own luck—or just be a lucky person—may prove critical in the job market of the future. Robert Frank argues that luck is going to play a greater role in sorting the winners from the almost-winners. Our work used to serve local markets. Now, given the internet and international distribution channels, we’re more able to compete in a global market. That, in turn, makes the rewards altogether more massive, which in turn encourages greater competition for that work among more hard-working and talented people. But, Frank contends, there are limits to how talented you can be and how hard you can work. If more and more people are working at or close to those limits, what’s going to be the factor that allows the few to stand out? “It’s luck that’s going to give you the extra heft,” he contends.
“It’s a topic I actually don’t discuss with undergraduates because they haven’t seen enough of life to accept that lack of control,” chuckles Wei. “Some of us actively choose to believe that the world is less random than it is because that’s more comfortable. But I think the older you get, the more realistic you are. You’ve seen that good and bad luck play a role in life”.
More than that, maybe it dictates every single aspect of it. That’s because there’s another, perhaps slightly terrifying way of thinking about luck, which is that everything is a product of it. Consider that what we think of as being random (and humans, designed as we are to see patterns, are pretty bad at understanding randomness at the best of times) is rather just the playing out of inevitability, with one event leading inexorably to another, to another, to another, through all time and across a vast interconnected web of happenings. Determinism, to give its philosophical name, implies no real chance events and, more disconcertingly for many, no free will. “Luck [in that sense] may have a deeper role in our lives than we really want to recognise—than even I want to recognise,” laughs Michael Sauder.
So maybe that’s a bit much. But a more open acceptance that luck does play its part could have a profound impact at both the individual and societal levels. Research suggests that the more we believe in a fortune-free meritocracy, the less willing we are to do anything to help society at large. Conversely, the more we recognise that good luck has played a positive role in our lives—and the more gratitude we express for it—not only the happier we are but, says Sauder, the more compassion we feel for strangers. So you’ve got to ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?
