He’s right! I love that he called it out. He’s got an edge of outcome bias for sure. Makes me want to see more of his stuff.
His movie Elevation was better than the reviews say it is, I liked it a lot and thought it was one of his best performances. Just my $0.02.
Here is a fun thought experiment. In any zero sum game there will be a Warren Buffet. And people will follow him or her around asking for their advice and writing books on it while ignoring all the people who did exactly the same thing that lost everything.
So for the experiment it’s a coin flipping championship with millions of participants. Heads you win and move on, tails you lose. All the coins are the same and totally fair. Someone will win far more than everyone else. People will follow this person around, invite them to speak publicly, write books, and so on. If they fail to understand the world properly they’ll buy into it and even tell people their secret to flipping coins successfully.
Don’t be fooled by randomness. Instead motivate against bad luck and position yourself to exploit good luck.
Here is a fun thought experiment. In any zero sum game there will be a Warren Buffet. And people will follow him or her around asking for their advice and writing books on it while ignoring all the people who did exactly the same thing that lost everything.
So for the experiment it’s a coin flipping championship with millions of participants. Heads you win and move on, tails you lose. All the coins are the same and totally fair. Someone will win far more than everyone else. People will follow this person around, invite them to speak publicly, write books, and so on. If they fail to understand the world properly they’ll buy into it and even tell people their secret to flipping coins successfully.
Thats an incomplete thought experiment for this topic and and in my mind it makes it invalid. Even your own followup statement (which i agree with) negates your thought experiment.
Don’t be fooled by randomness. Instead motivate against bad luck and position yourself to exploit good luck.
I agree with this but this is the opposite of your thought experiment.
I think of more of the concept of good luck (and bad for that matter) are harvested. If you make choices create conditions in your life that will give you more coin flips that others on both good and bad luck. If you get a college degree, you will have options to flip the coin for opportunities that require a college degree. If you don’t have the degree you don’t even get the chance to flip the coin. Keep in mind, I’m not saying getting a degree will absolutely lead to success. No of course not, but if the particular lucky opportunity in front of two people requires a degree and one person has it and the other doesn’t. The degree-less person doesn’t even have the chance at the luck.
The same thing occurs with bad luck. If you hang out with people that shoplift, even if you don’t, you run the risk of being unlucky enough to have to flip the coin when to be accused of shoplifting because of the actions of those around you. It doesn’t mean you’ll absolutely get charged with shoplifted even if you did nothing, but the chance increases that you will.
The article even covers lots of this for those that didn’t read it. Mackie wasn’t just some guy off the street that landed an MCU role. He did a WHOLE BUNCH OF THINGS that gave him more chances at luck.
- After graduating from the prestigious Juilliard School in 2001
- he performed in both on- and Off-Broadway productions
- and in Academy award-winning films, like 2008’s “The Hurt Locker.”
- he worked his ass of acting: Mackie estimates he “put in 10,750 hours of training” before landing that life-changing job.
- He was proactive, too: He wrote letters to executives at Disney’s Marvel Studios over a decade ago in the hopes of landing a role in one of the studio’s popular superhero films,
Each one of these things and dozens more were his hard work that gave him more chances to flip the good luck coin. So while its true that someone else could have done all of these exact same things and still not succeeded where Mackie did, had Mackie not done these things it is highly likely he would never have become an actor we know of today.
So put the hard work into giving yourself more chances of flipping the “good luck coin” and few chances to flip the “bad luck coin”.
Everyone works hard who isn’t born rich.
The working class people who are successful are literally just luckier than the others.
If everyone had equal opportunities then there would be way more people lucky enough to be handed the opportunity to do well.
Luck is at least 95% of success
Hmm I think you can get moderate success with 95% hard work. 5% of bad luck can keep you from that.
There are very, very few who made it big with hard work, like being CEOs and stuff. For them, yeah I’d agree that luck was 95% of success (or being intelligent enough to come up with something notable and unique, which is also luck)
What “moderate” success do you want me to say you are responsible for through your hard work?
Being born into a family instead of the foster care system?
Being born into a non-impoverished family?
Being born during a time in human history where you were allowed to read and write and own property? (if you are a woman or colored, more than half the population.)
Not having all your possessions burned in a fire and then having no insurance because you can’t afford it?
Being lucky enough every single day that you don’t randomly lose everything through no fault of your own?
Every person born in every situation gets a roll of the dice.
Your roll was luckier than the people you look down on but less lucky than the people you envy.
“Mackie estimates he ‘put in 10,750 hours of training’ before landing that life-changing job. He was proactive, too: He wrote letters to executives at Disney’s Marvel Studios over a decade ago in the hopes of landing a role in one of the studio’s popular superhero films…”
That sure sounds like hard work to me. What do you think luck is, my guy? It’s putting yourself out there, building connections, and making things happen. That’s how it works. If you sit on your couch all day a studio exec isn’t going to ring you up for a staring part in a marvel movie.
In fact, I might go so far to say his flavor of “luck” exists to prop a person up as a standout above others—destined to be so.
This is the dumbest take you could possibly get from this.
Edit: In case you didn’t get it from the article. He is saying all that extra work he put in didn’t actually get him parts… It was random timing and luck that landed him a role.
To be fair, I think all the extra work he did do helped the luck come to him. He was constantly working and looking to get those roles, so when they did come around, he was ready to take the opportunity. Luck is still the dominant factor, but working to be ready to take advantage of the chance was important too.
That’s still luck, not hard work.
No, it’s definitely both. Luck is going to be the larger factor on that level of success, but there’s still a large portion of hard work that went into it.
We want to dismiss the successful as just being born under the right star, but a large portion of it is still hard work. They get disproportionately rewarded for that hard work, and often they have to do less and less hard work as time goes on… but there was hard work involved, whether we want to admit it or not.
No wonder propaganda is so effective. Someone can tell you to your face their experience, and people will just dismiss it out of hand.
You’re right! The man can say he works hard for years and you dismiss it as entirely as just luck instead of mostly luck.
No one is saying luck isn’t the deciding factor here, we’re just saying there’s also a limited measure of hard work. It’s not all just one thing. There is a very precious few who just keep falling into luck over and over again, but they’re in the extreme minority of even the successful. The majority of them put in some hard work.
Good talk.
I suggest reading Fooled by Randomness.
But I respect you for being confidently wrong.
Sounds like you need to understand statistics. If another person followed his footsteps and put in 10,750 hours, would they land in the same spot as him? Is that path repeatable by anyone? No? That’s luck.
