Better Lucky Than Good (part one)

It never fails to amaze me when otherwise sane people discount the importance of luck in life. “You make your own luck” and “the harder you work the luckier you get” are cliches most of us grow up hearing. They are over-simplifications, though, like lots of other truisms. Ironically, folks that profess to believe them are usually themselves the beneficiaries of good luck.

Good looks and high IQs are strictly accidental. With the exception of good health, however, nothing else comes close to being as important in terms of predicting success. All fertile adults are capable of producing beautiful and/or brilliant offspring, as well as hideous dimwitted freaks. Doing so, though, is strictly a matter of chance. The parents and the kids don’t earn it or in any other way deserve it. Most Americans don’t like to admit it, but people not born with physical beauty and/or powerful intellects are almost certainly destined to live lives of mediocrity, and that’s if they are lucky. (Exceptions would be those born with marketable abilities, such as musicianship or athleticism. Even more luck is then involved in making such talents pay.)

There are other factors involved. Dogged determination and vast stores of energy help in the quest for what most Americans call success. (That would be earned wealth.) Contrary to what beneficiaries of either might like to believe, they aren’t qualities subject to the will. It’s all in the genes, and even if the environment plays some part, one would have to be lucky enough to be the product of the right environment.

The moral is that if you were born to bright and beautiful parents who provided you a loving and stable environment to develop whatever gifts they passed on to you, thank your lucky stars. If your family is affluent, all the more so. The factors most important for success in our hyper-competitive society aren’t earned, they are inherited. People are born with or into the things necessary for success. It’s dumb luck.