The Father of All Skills: Luck
This text is an elaboration of my current beliefs about topics related to skills, personnal attributes
(physical and mental) and their relationship with the concept of luck. I will also touch
on the concept of pride and the idea that pride should be replaced with satisfaction.
Why All Achievements Boils Down to Luck
For the sake of clarification, let's define luck as "something positive that
is out of someone's direct control". For example, being tall is based on luck
(if you value being tall as something positive and if you agree
that height is based on genetic factors) because you have no control
on the height you have: it's therefore luck. But do we actually
have real "control" on any of our attributes and on our achievements?
Most people easily digest that height is out of their control, because
it seems like such an obvious fact. The concept of luck and control begins
to be interesting when we dig deeper on aspects that people take pride in.
Let's take the example of a specific achievement that someone
might take pride in: obtaining a university degree. To understand how
it was possible for someone to obtain a degree, we must discover the required
skills and find the root of these skills. This "meta root" will be the true reason
for why the person was able to obtain a degree. Spoiler alert: it's luck.
Let's stipulate that to obtain a degree, someone needs 2 things: the
required minimal level of intelligence to understand the concepts related
to the degree and the will to make the sacrifices (money, time, energy, effort)
to complete the degree.
I think these are 2 very good things to analyse because they are also found
in all other skills or achievements: you will always need the minmal amount of
talent and the minimal amount of will required to acheive something.
To continue with our degree example, let's find the true enabler (the root) of the 2
required pillars to accomplish a degree (intelligence/talent and will)
The first one is having the minimal level of intelligence required. Intelligence is based on
genetics and on environmental factors, both things that can't be controlled.
It's quite clear you don't control your genetics, but what about environment?
Well turns out you don't control this either, and if you do it's because
your intelligence (which is luck based) enabled you to do so. Let me explain:
if you are born in a bad environment and you purposely choose to do change
environment to develop yourself further, this is still luck based because
the very thought that changing environment will help you develop your intelligence
implies enough intelligence for this realisation to happen, and this
intelligence was out of your control (you were born with it) so it was luck.
If you are born in a bad environment and don't do anything about it well
it was also out of your control: you didn't choose your environment.
To make things clearer, let's look at the next requirement for a degree.
The second thing required for a degree is will. To me this is the most interesting
aspect because it's the one that's less obvious and the hardest to accept.
We want to know what enabled someone to have the required minimal amount of will
to be able to finish the university degree. To illustrate this, imagine
the following discussion between a person A and B.
A: Why were you able to complete that degree?
B:I put the efforts and gave it my best!
A: And why were you able to give it your best?
What enabled you to give it your best and why are some other people unable to
put the effort?
B: Well I simply have more will power, I'm not lazy, I have strong will!
A: Why do you have strong will and some others don't?
B: Because they're lazy, and I'm not.
A: Okay, but why? Why are you less lazy?
B: Leave me alone.
To me it seems quite obvious that the concept of will and effort is a meta cognitive skill
that some people simply don't have and some others do. Even if person B said he
wasn't lazy and he made efforts, it doesn't explain at all why he was able
to make these efforts while others couldn't. Being hard working and motivated
is a skill based on luck, you don't decide to be able to put the efforts and
be motivated, you simply put the efforts because a skill of yours (that you
did not chose or have control over) enables you to work harder than most.
In the previous paragraphs we used the university degree as an example of a
common achievement that people take pride in and we attempted to
prove that such achievement boiled down to luck. The interesting thing is that
if you think about it, these two requirements we evaluated (talent and will)
are the two requirements for everything we acheive. If someone want's to be a
professional sprinter, he needs the will to train hard and the minimal talent
required (legs). If he doesn't have both, he can't suceed. We came to the
conclusion that both talent and will boiled down to luck, which prooves by
transitivity that all skills and achievements boil down to luck (to attributes
we don't really control). The counter argument for this would be to prove that
will power is not a born with meta skill: something I wasn't able to do. Even
if someone proves that will power is nurtured and not a gift from nature,
this person would need to prove that the root of this nurture is not luck, which
from my current perspective would be very hard to do.
Pride vs Satisfaction
Since the power to achieve things is out of our control, pride doesn't really make sense. Why be
proud of things you were able to do because of traits you don't control? You can be happy and
satisfied about a trait or attribute you have, and particularly about
a skill you honed over the years, but at the end of the day it was just
luck that enabled all of it. This might be a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people: we all like
to identify ourselves with our accomplishments, denying our control over
these accomplishments can be like reducing the scope of our identity. I think we should swap
pride with satisfaction: be happy of the traits and attributes you have because of the
things they enable you to do, but there's nothing to be proud about, you have no real control
about what you can or can't acheive. The reason why this is important is because
it's a great step in reducing ego, which I believe is essential to growth (will probably
write about this in another text).
These are my current thoughts on the subject of achievements and luck. As always
these thoughts are subject to change.
On a positive note, I strongly believe that introspection and the realisation
of such concepts is an essential part of growth and of self acceptance. Accepting
or concluding that we have no real control on our achievements might be hard to
to do for some, but it's a big step towards ego rejection and self discovery, two things
I value greatly.