“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
The well-known investor and multibillionaire Warren Buffett suggested a thought experiment in 1997.
“Considerate that a genie appears to you a day before your birth,” the speaker said.
The genie claims that you can create anything you like and choose the laws of the society you are about to enter. The norms that govern society, the economy, and the government are all your creations. And those guidelines will stand for the duration of your life, the lives of your children, and the lives of your grandkids.
“There’s a catch, though,” he stated.
“You never know if you’ll be born in Afghanistan or the United States, male or female, wealthy or impoverished, or physically weak or strong. You are only aware that one ball will be extracted from a barrel containing 5.8 billion balls. You are that, too.
To put it another way, you’ll participate in what I call the Ovarian Lottery,” says Buffett. And that is the most significant event in your life that will ever occur. It will influence far more than just your choice of school, level of effort, and other factors.
Buffett has always supported the idea that luck plays a part in success. He stated in his 2014 Annual Letter, “[My business partner Charlie and I] are eternally grateful for the staggering advantages this accident of birth has given us. We were born in the United States through dumb luck.”
This explanation makes it difficult to argue against the significance of luck, chance, and good fortune in life. Indeed, these elements are quite important. Let’s think about a different tale, though.
The Project 523 Story
A Chinese scientist called Tu Youyou was appointed head of a covert research group in Beijing in 1969, the fourteenth year of the Vietnam War. Project 523 was the only code designation given to the unit.
China was Vietnam’s ally, and Project 523 had been established to provide antimalarial drugs that the soldiers could take. The illness has grown to be a major issue. Malaria in the woods was killing as many Vietnamese soldiers as combat casualties.
Tu started her work by searching everywhere she could for hints. She studied guides on traditional medicine. She combed through hundreds or thousands of years’ worth of old manuscripts. She went to far-off places to look for plants that could have medicinal properties.
Her team spent months gathering over 600 plants and compiling a list of nearly 2,000 potential cures. Tu carefully and gradually reduced the number of possible drugs to 380 and examined each individually in lab mice.
She claimed that this phase of the project was the most difficult. “It was an extremely hard and boring job, especially when you kept failing at it.”
Numerous tests were conducted. None of them produced any results. However, one experiment using an extract from the qinghao plant, sweet wormwood, looked promising. Tu was thrilled with the prospect, but try as she may, the plant would rarely yield a potent antimalarial drug. It could have been more effective.
Even though her team had been working together for two years, she felt they should start from scratch. Tu reviewed every exam and studied every book again to determine what she missed. Then, as if by magic, she happened upon a single line in The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, an antiquated Chinese book composed more than a millennium ago.
The heat was the problem. The active component in the sweet wormwood plant would be lost if the extraction process was carried out at a too high temperature. After redesigning the experiment using lower boiling point solvents, Tu produced an antimalarial drug that was 100% effective.
Although it was a significant advance, the job was ahead of us.
The Influence of Sufficient Work
Human trials could begin now that medicine has been demonstrated to work. Regretfully, at that time, China lacked any centers conducting drug studies. Furthermore, visiting a facility abroad was not an option because of the project’s exclusivity.
They had come to a standstill.
Tu offered to trial the drug on humans as the first subject. She and two other members of Project 523 gave herself the first doses of their new medication, malaria, in one of the most audacious gestures in medical history.
It was successful.
But Tu was kept from informing the public about her discoveries, even though she had found a game-changing drug and was prepared to risk her own life to do so. Strict regulations imposed by the Chinese government prevented the publication of any scientific data.
She was not deterred. Tu persisted in her investigation, finally discovering the drug’s chemical makeup (technically known as artemisinin), and she went on to create a second antimalarial drug.
Tu’s work was not made public until 1978, three years after the Vietnam War finished and nearly ten years after she started. The World Health Organization did not advise the use of medication as a preventative measure against malaria until 2000.
To date, artemisinin has been used to treat over one billion cases of malaria, saving millions of lives. Tu Youyou is the first Chinese citizen and woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in medicine and the Lasker Award for distinguished service to the field of medicine.
Is it Hard Work or Luck?
Tu Youyou did not have extraordinary luck. What I find most fascinating about her is her lack of a postgraduate degree, overseas research experience, and membership in any Chinese national academies—a characteristic that has earned her the moniker “The Professor of the Three No’s.”
But she worked so damned hard. tenacious. Industrious and motivated. She persisted for decades, and as a result, she saved millions of lives. Her tale serves as a wonderful illustration of perseverance’s value in reaching achievement.
It seemed logical a minute ago that the Ovarian Lottery determined most of your life’s success. Still, hard effort is important. You usually obtain better benefits from hard labor than from less effort. Even while luck plays a significant role, everyone believes hard work matters.
What, then, makes anything successful? Is it luck or hard work? Work or happenstance? We all know that both factors matter, but I’d like to respond to your question with something more insightful than “It depends.”
Here are two perspectives I have on the matter.
Comparing Relative and Absolute Success
One approach to responding to this subject is to say that hard work counts more in a relative sense and luck matters more in an absolute sense.
The absolute view considers how successful you are compared to other people. What qualifies someone as the world’s greatest in a specific field? Success, when seen from this angle, is almost always due to chance. You can’t know everything that leads to world-class results, even if you make a wise initial decision—like Bill Gates did when he decided to launch a computer company.
Generally speaking, the more extraordinary and improbable the conditions that led to success, the wilder the outcome. Frequently, it’s a confluence of favorable genes, connections, timing, and a myriad of other factors that no one is intelligent enough to foresee.
Generally speaking, the more extraordinary and improbable the conditions that led to success, the wilder the outcome.
There is also the relative view, which considers how successful you are compared to people who are similar to you. But what about the millions of people born with similar genetic talent who grew up in similar communities or obtained similar educational backgrounds? These folks are getting different outcomes. Hard labor plays a greater role in determining success the more localized the comparison. The distinction between you and individuals with comparable degrees of luck is your choices and habits.
Success without limits is a matter of fortune. Success is a product of habits and choices.
This concept inevitably leads to a crucial realization: chance plays a bigger part in extreme outcomes. In other words, when you achieve greater success overall, we can assign a higher percentage of your achievements to chance.
In his book Fooled by Randomness, Nassim Taleb stated that labor and skill can account for mild success, while variance contributes to wild success.
How to Bring Fortune Into Your Favor
Luck is, by definition, uncontrollable. Nevertheless, it is helpful to comprehend its function and significance so that you can be ready for good or bad luck to strike.
Mathematician and computer engineer Richard Hamming succinctly summarized what it takes to produce outstanding work in his excellent talk, You and Your Research, by stating, “There is indeed an element of luck, and no, there isn’t.” The ready mind eventually discovers something significant and takes action. Thus, the answer is indeed luck. Your specific action is fortunate, but the action itself is not.
By acting, you can expand your area of potential good luck. Wide-ranging exploration by the forager will yield a lot of useless territory. Still, it also increases the likelihood of discovering a plentiful berry patch compared to staying put. Similarly, the individual who puts in a lot of effort seizes opportunities and tries a greater number of things is likely to find luck than the one who waits. Nine major tournaments have been won by renowned golfer Gary Player, who once quipped, “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”
Ultimately, we do not influence our luck—good or bad—. Still, we do have control over our preparation and effort. Everybody gets lucky now and then. And when it does, you should work hard and take full advantage of your good fortune.
