Is Success Luck or Hard Work?

During the COVID lockdown, this headline went viral: "Nearly half of men say they do most of their schooling at home... ...three percent of women agree." I mention this not to debate who is right, but because it is a great example of something called egocentric bias: most people think they do most of the

work

. For example, researchers have asked authors of multi-authored papers what percentage of the

work

they did personally, and when they add up those percentages, the sum averages 140 percent. When couples are asked to estimate how much of the housework they do, the combined total almost always exceeds 100%.

Now you might think this is because people want to appear more helpful than they really are, but that's not all. When couples are asked what fraction of the fights they start or how much of the mess is theirs, the total is again over one hundred. People think they do more work, but they also think they cause more problems. So why is this? I think it's simply because you experience and vividly remember everything you do, but not everything others do, so you naturally overestimate your own contributions and underestimate others. And I think this bias leads us to underestimate the influence of other things in our lives, such as the role

luck

plays in our

success

.

Take hockey players for example. If you ask a professional hockey player how he made it to the NHL, he's likely to mention his

hard

work, his determination, his great coaches, his parents' willingness to get up at 5 a. m., etc., but he probably won't recognize how

luck

y he was. They were due to be born in January. And yet, in many years, 40% of hockey players drafted into top-tier leagues are born in the first quarter of the year, compared to just 10% in the fourth quarter; An early birthday can increase your chances of becoming a professional hockey player by up to four times.

And the reason for this disparity is presumably because the deadline for kids hockey leagues is January 1st. Those born in the first part of the year are a little older and therefore on average bigger and faster than the children in their league born at the end of the year. Now, as they grow, this difference should eventually reduce to nothing, but it doesn't. Because young people who share more promise are given more time on the ice and participate in more tournaments, where they receive better training and improve their skills. And these advantages accumulate year after year, so when you get to the pros, birthdays are heavily skewed toward the beginning of the year.

But is any professional hockey player grateful for his birthday? Probably not. And we are all like that, largely oblivious to the fortunate events that underpin our

success

. Probably the most important luck that many of us enjoy is to have been born in a prosperous country; About half of the variation in the income received by people around the world is explained by their country of residence and that country's income distribution. If you were born in Burundi, for example, which has the lowest per capita gross national income in the world, just $730 a year, it doesn't matter how smart or

hard

-working you are;

You're unlikely to earn much as an adult. Now a lot of people get offended if you point out the important role that chance plays in their success and I understand that. If we are just a product of our circumstances, then our hard work and talent seem to count for nothing. People think it has to be skill or luck that explains success, but the truth is that you need both. Take these eight track and field world records for example: all of the athletes who achieve these records are obviously world class, extremely dedicated and talented, and yet when they achieved their world records, seven out of eight had a tailwind.

Now, all of these athletes had the ability to win a gold medal, but setting the world record also required a bit of luck. The importance of luck increases the greater the number of candidates applying for a few positions. Consider the most recent generation of NASA astronauts. Of more than 18,300 applicants in 2017, only 11 were selected and graduated from the astronaut training program. Now we can make a toy model of the selection process. Let's say astronauts are selected primarily based on skill, experience, and hard work, but let's also say that five percent is a result of luck—fortunate circumstances.

For each applicant, I randomly generated a skill score out of one hundred and also randomly generated a luck score out of a hundred. I then added up those numbers, weighted at a ratio of 95 to 5 to get an overall score. This score represents the coach's judgments, meaning the top 11 by this metric would become astronauts. And I repeated this simulation a thousand times representing a thousand different selections of astronauts. And what I discovered was that the chosen astronauts were very lucky; They had an average luck score of 94.7. So how many of the astronauts selected would have been in the top 11 based on ability alone?

The answer was, on average, only 1.6. That means that even if luck accounts for only 5% of the outcome, 9 or maybe 10 of the 11 successful applicants would have been different if luck had played no role. When competition is fierce, having talent and working hard is important, but it is not enough to guarantee success. You also need to take a break. To a large extent, I think we are unaware of our good fortune because, by definition, it is not something we did. Just like the household chores your partner does, they are not valued. And here's the crazy thing: downplaying chance events can actually improve your chance of success because if you perceive an outcome to be uncertain, you're less likely to invest effort into it, which further decreases your chances of success.

Therefore, it is a useful delusion to believe that you are in complete control of your destiny. I mean, if I had known how bad it was when I started YouTube or how much work it would require, maybe I would have given up then. "Welcome to Veritasium - an online science vlog". Now, there may be another benefit to overlooking your lucky breaks, and that is that it makes it easier to justify your place in society: if you have a lot of wealth or power, you can attribute it to your own intelligence, effort, and perseverance. . It makes it easier to accept inequality.

In one experiment, participants were placed in groups of three in small rooms to discuss a complex moral problem, and one person from each group was randomly designated as the team leader. Half an hour later, the experimenter arrived with four cookies for each team. So who got the extra cookie? In each case, it went to the team leader. Although they had no special skills, they had no additional responsibilities and had obtained their position solely by chance. Once you've achieved a certain status, it seems natural to feel like you deserve it and all the other good things that come your way.

Now, this is just an anecdote, but every time I was upgraded to fly business class, I always observed the worst behavior in my privileged fellow travelers; They just act so entitled and rude. And research has found evidence of this too. In another experiment, participants were asked to think about something good that had recently happened to them, and then one group was asked to list their own personal qualities or actions that made that good thing happen, another group was asked to list external factors beyond their control that led to the event, and a control group was simply asked to list the reasons why something good happened.

Now, for completing this task, participants were told they would be paid one dollar, but at the end they were offered the option to donate some or all of the money to a charity. The results showed that those who listed their own personal attributes contributed 25% less than those who listed external factors outside their control. Now think about what all this means for people in our society, specifically people in positions of power like business and political leaders. Sure, most of them are talented and hardworking, but they've also been luckier than most and, like most of us, they don't realize how lucky they are.

And this gives them a distorted view of reality. They live in a kind of survivor bias: all of these leaders have worked hard and ultimately succeeded, so the world seems fair to them. In their experience, it rewards hard work, but what they don't have is the experience of all the people who have worked hard and failed. So what are they going to do with people less successful than them? Well, the natural conclusion is that they must simply be less talented or less hardworking, and this perspective makes them less likely to be generous and give back. And they are the ones who establish the rules of how society works.

And this is particularly unfortunate since one of the main reasons many of us are lucky is in our country of residence. But what is a country except the things that the people who came before put there? Roads and schools, public transportation, emergency services, clean air and water, all of it. It seems like a cruel trick of our psychology that successful people without any malice attribute their success largely to their own hard work and ingenuity and therefore contribute less to maintaining the very circumstances that made that success possible in the first place. The good news is that recognizing our fortunate circumstances not only brings us closer to reality, it also makes us more likeable.

In a study in which people had to read the transcript of a 60-minute fictional interview with a biotech entrepreneur, the experimenters tried to change only the last paragraph where the interviewee talks about the reasons for his company's success. In one version, the businessman takes personal credit for the success he has had, but in the other, he says that luck played a big role. Now people who read the lucky version of the transcript judged the businessman as friendlier and thought they would be more likely to be close friends with him than those who read the other version of the transcript.

And increasing our awareness of lucky events can also make us happier because it allows us to feel gratitude. Personally, I'm grateful to Michael Stevens of Vsauce, who on October 7, 2012 posted the video: "How Much Does a Shadow Weigh?", which shouts out my slow-motion sneak fall video, and within three days my subscribers had increased by a third and, within a month, they had doubled, leading me to quit my part-time job and work exclusively on YouTube videos. And I'm grateful to the writer of the free newspaper they give out on trains in Sydney who didn't understand electricity very well, which led me to post this image of his article on my Instagram with the caption: "What's wrong with this image? ?" And I'm lucky that the first person who answered correctly was a beautiful woman who became my future wife.

Yeah! That's how I met your mother. Initially, I wanted to make this video just to say that our circumstances and psychology conspire to make us oblivious to our own fate. This leads successful people to see the world as fair and those who are less successful than them as less talented or less hardworking. And this is before taking into account any discrimination or prejudice. But it also became clear to me that I should talk about what to do if you want to be successful in such a world, and I think the best advice is paradoxical. First, you must believe that you are in complete control of your destiny and that your success comes down solely to your own talent and hard work.

But secondly, know that that's not true for you or anyone else. So you must remember: if you achieve success, luck played an important role and, given your good luck, you must do what you can to increase the luck of others. Hey, so I had an idea of ​​what I could do to increase the luck of others and that is to give away a hundred snatom kits to people who otherwise couldn't afford it. So if you didn't know, snatoms is a product that I invented and launched five years ago. It is a molecular modeling kit in which all atoms are magnetically linked.

I did it because I really wanted to address the misconception that bonds store energy. They do not do it. It takes energy to break them, and that can be felt with snatoms. Recently, I completely reorganized the snatums. So, there are little holes where the magnets are. This allows them to touch each other directly, increasing the bonding strength, so that larger, more stable molecules can form. I call these "snatomsX". And yes, they are compatible with previous versions of snatomsoriginals. So here's my idea: for the next month you can buy snatoms for 10% off using the code "giveluck" and for every one sold, I'll give a kit to someone who can't afford it, up to a limit of one hundred.

So I'll put links and more details in the description, and I really want to thank you for watching and thank you for all my good luck.