Hard Work vs Luck is a False Dichotomy

Greatness emerges from a virtuous cycle of hard work and luck compounding on each other.

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It’s so frustrating when people take one side in the false dichotomy of hard work vs luck. Both are necessary for greatness and neither is sufficient on its own.

Further complicated the debate is the fact that hard work & luck are so tangled up together – they feed into each other.

• If you work hard, you’re more likely to get lucky – you create more lucky opportunities (“luck surface area”) and are better prepared to capitalize on them.

• If you capitalize on a lucky opportunity and feel like you’re succeeding / your hard work is making a difference, you get excited/motivated to lean into it further and continue working even harder. (“Nothing succeeds like success.”)

Greatness emerges from a virtuous cycle of hard work and luck compounding on each other.

Note: talent (in the sense of an innate / biological / genetic component, not just the product of hard work) is relevant too, and I mean for it to be implicitly encapsulated in the “luck” component. People don’t like to acknowledge it because unlike the other components, it’s constant – you cannot influence it like you can the other components.

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