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Let's talk about the most important, yet often overlooked, factor affecting your life, how well off you are, what kind of job do you have, if any, whether you live in comfort or struggle to make a living. Let's talk about randomness and luck. /thread
Your first die is rolled at the moment you are born. Where you are born is by far the most important choice you did not make, e.g. being born in a 1st-world country opens you a door to lots of opportunities that the majority of the world population cannot even dream of.
Being born to wealthy parents is an example of extreme luck. It paves the road for you to become the next Gates or Bezos. Have you ever wondered what makes entrepreneurs different from other people? The answer is simple -- typically that's wealthy parents https://fortune.com/2015/07/17/entrepreneurs-family-money/
Look at me, for example. I did not start my life with any sort of wealth, but I was lucky enough to have well-educated parents. In a modern world of knowledge and technology that is by itself a very good headstart in life that only a fraction of humans have.
It is natural to accept our ancestry as being beyond our control, but during the later course of our conscious life, we tend to attribute too much to our own decisions and achievements, forgetting about the essential randomness of life.
Even as our parents usually try to stack the odds in our favor, still the schools we went into, good or bad teachers we had on various subjects, the company of neighborhood friends we played with, the first job we got. All of it mostly chance, all play a big role in our future.
We often grow and mature among our peers, people with similar backgrounds. What brings some of them to the top? Why our world has so much inequality even when we look at a small slice of our childhood friends that we started to be on par with?
Success is not all about money, but money is an easy measure to model it. There is a simple mathematical model that starts with an even distribution of wealth and explains the observed inequality in the world using just the randomness of interactions https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
TL;DR: You cannot become wealthy without being exceptionally lucky. The inverse is a myth that is simply not true.
Moreover, for those of us who are well off in life, it is imperative to acknowledge the role that randomness played in it. Meritocracy, the belief that our hard work is solely responsible for our success, is not just at odds with reality https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
"A growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad."
Our world is in dire need of compassion and empathy to people who are less educated, less knowledgeable, less wealthy, and, overall, were less fortunate in their lives.
This is especially a problem in social networks where otherwise reasonable, smart, and influential people casually flaunt cars, houses, vacations, and other lifestyle items that most of their readers cannot possess regardless of how much effort they put into it.
Let us recognize that most of our differences are due to pure randomness. Let us respect the people who were not as lucky.
Q: But what about hard work? A: Hard work is still needed for exceptional achievement. There is no shortage in acknowledging that. But when we focus on those kinds of success stories we ignore hundreds of other people who worked harder but were not as fortuitous.
Discounting randomness breeds dangerous hubris, looking arrogantly at people who accomplished less in our field by our standards, thinking this is purely their fault, their lack of execution. However, others often did not have a chance in the first place. Do not miss this fact.
