This made me think of late grandmother who used to say : "c'est faite par du mondes" which roughly expand to "a person did/learned/discovered that so there is no a prioi reason that I cannot do so myself". That's the greatest value she passed unto me. When I feel that I cannot do something, I think about that phrase and persevere.
I actually work for a guy like this now and at first I didn't quite get what he was doing, but I really like it now. He comes from a non-technical background but can code enough to be dangerous now.
He loves talking to experts in every facet of what we do, and just start from the most basic foundational questions. He has absolutely no ego about embarrassing himself by the basics of questions he asks and no shame about digging in with follow ups.
It's actually quite a powerful thing. Experts love to explain things if given the space. You also start to realize how narrow and sometimes shallow expertise is, and it lowers your own anxiety.
> You also start to realize how narrow and sometimes shallow expertise is
Thanks for putting this in such clear words.
What I would really like to learn is not to be ticked off about seeing this. I get annoyed when somebody is pawning their expertise of as something grand while I think it's quite limited, and often, of course, so limited that they can't even conceive of the space outside their limits. I find my natural reaction overly negative and just not productive.
This resonates with me. I’ve so far chalked it up to envy of their “unearned” confidence that’s rooted in my own self-esteem issues. Recognizing a fellow imposter in the wild.
I think it is fine to look at the details of what actually was achieved, see if it had an impact. In that particular case, the achievement seems to be contributing to operations to development of a new candidate COVID vaccine and putting it via a Phase-1 trial in South Africa, with the following result:
DNA SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Alveavax-V1.2) - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4645890
While safe, well tolerated, and shelf stable for >6 months at room temperature, a naked DNA SARS-CoV-2 booster candidate in doses up to 8 mg administered intradermally or subcutaneously, as well as Janssen Ad26.COV2.S comparator, did not significantly increase BA.2 antibody titers in a preimmunized, largely pre-infected population.
Not a breakthrough, but it is productive. Likely worth the resources that were spent on this. So it is just good job, keep on going. There's really no point of being negative or annoyed.
What is not clear to me, is if the author is applying herself in the place where she has an edge and could be most impactful. A world class poker player and Yale Law School grad potentially can do well in politics. Upholding democracy seems like a kind of annoying job that Yale grads should be on.
Yes, pride is the biggest obstacle to growth. It prevents you from making our needs known, because it means making an admission that you lack something (like knowledge or understanding, in this case). It means being honest about what you are (humility), revealing your deficits. And we all have deficits. We all have lack. Love is about seeking and receiving what you lack (eros), and giving to those who lack what they seek (agape).
So what does this tell us, this tendency toward pride? I means many of us spend a horrifying amount of time posing, pretending, feigning worth we don't actually have, in order to appear to be something we are not, because we think this will get us things we couldn't by being honest. In order words, we're liars, fraud, and cheats. We lie to get things we know, or least believe, we do not deserve, through false advertising. And we fear being belittled and ridiculed and put down, or losing or losing something. We shirk responsibility this way. We confuse purity with a kind of "cleanliness". We want to appear clean, but become impure and corrupt in doing so.
The choice between pride and humility is, I think, the basic decision in life one must make, and keep making, and it can be difficult as the world does not make it easy to prefer what is good. It seems to want to reward you for pretense, and punish you for honesty and the truth. That's why you also need courage, the courage to surrender to the consequences, of doing the right thing and being humble, and embrace them. You cannot control anything but your actions within your limits. You need to be able to accept just but painful outcomes gladly, and suffer the injustices. The inability to suffer, to suffer injustice, is the gateway to pride, and pride comes before the fall, before death and stagnation. You get further in life by suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward.[0] There is no life in you otherwise. There is no love in you otherwise.
[0] This is also why the Via Crucis is so powerful. Life is not a party or a pleasure garden. It's a struggle that ends in death. The only choice is one between miserable comfort and wasteful decay on the one hand, and struggle, suffering, and total exhaustion on the other. The Via Crucis, a road full of suffering that passes through death, at least ends in final liberation. But that is the price, the narrow gate. Most choose the wide gate of miserable self-preservation, something they will loose in the end anyway.
I always assumed everyone assumed everything was learnable. Realizing this (i.e., that being everyone's default belief) might not be the case is kind of blowing my mind a little right now.
When I've heard that before I always just thought they meant they had no particular talent for it and weren't interested enough to learn. More a case of choosing to focus on things you feel more naturally inclined to, as opposed to thinking something is unlearnable for you.
Agreed, I've always believed you can learn anything you want. The realization I was talking about was the one where maybe that's not the default assumption for everyone.
Surely you've heard countless "I just can't do math", "I can't draw to save my life", "I don't have talent for X", "Piano teacher tried but I just have no talent for it", "Wow, you must be very talented for doing Y", no?
Yes, dismissing mental and health problems can make people not seek treatment, further increase them, or at more extreme cases even physically hurt people.
Dismissing social problems can have the equivalent of all those consequences, and even worse ones.
If someone want to do something enough, he should be compelled to seek help to overcome his limitations. Comment like your encourages learned helplessness, which to me is a lot more dangerous than what he said !
I grew up poor, had stints of homelessness, and all my friends/relatives came from the same background.
Learned helplessness is one of, if not the biggest, issues facing socially disadvantaged people. Money, counselling, temporary housing - all of this is moot and useless if the person retains a poor mindset.
Conversely, if there's a positive mindset, then they are most likely going to seek out those opportunities and use them to their advantage.
Without any quantifier/qualifier, say that "you can learn anything you want" is meaningless.
If you are not disabled (broadly speaking), you can learn to run, where running is a way of continuously moving your body in which for some time no foot is touching the ground (marching/walking = one foot is touching the ground always). But, can you learn to run the 100 m dash in under 12/13/14 seconds?
Sure, anybody can learn to draw, where drawing means moving the ink from pen to paper, but can you draw something that is objectively good? And if yes, how long will it take for someone like me, who has close to no talent for it?
There's all sort of obstacles to learning. It could be the price of the courses you want to take, the lack of motivation/willpower/discipline to follow through, poor learning skills, lack of equipment or materials.
People used to think few things were learnable and you had to have innate talent to learn something.
One of the few remaining holdouts of this idea is perfect pitch. Most people I've seen express an opinion don't believe it's learnable after some childhood cutoff period. I'm not sure how well researched it is, though.
I found this out late in life working on an environmental cause. We were all volunteers and had limited money, so I started learning about pipelines and regulations and legal concepts, etc etc. If you have the right kind of mind, it very empowering to be able to step into a new field and really learn it and work it.
The flip side of this is that not everyone’s brain works this way. In fact, I’d say the vast majority can’t do this. The biggest mistake an autodidact can make is assuming other people can learn like they do. But if you have the gift, use it and explore it and it will likely be highly rewarding to your life.
I don't think I can believe that the majority can't do this without some evidence. But regardless, I'm really curious what makes you think that? What in your opinion would be stopping them, other than maybe just not believing they can or bothering to try (which imo has nothing to do with whether they _can_)?
Based on the environmental and community based work I’ve done, and also my experience at school. I pick up most things on my own, and always suffered in a classroom environment.
But most people I know and have worked with are the opposite. They have real trouble picking up new subjects without a teacher guiding them through it and formal courses.
Anecdotal I know, but the true autodidacts I’ve encountered are rare in general terms. That said, a LOT of technology people can largely self-teach, and I think a much higher percentage of HN readers can learn new subjects quickly compared to the general population.
Thanks for elaborating. I think I realize now that we are talking about different things. I wasn't distinguishing between learning styles (e.g., guided or self taught), but more thinking of the ability to step into a new field and learn about it using whatever method works best for each individual. I think I understand now!
IMO, the majority of people are stumped by the opposite realization of yours: That you can be faced with a problem outside your sphere of knowledge, decide to teach yourself how to solve it, and then solve it.
I'd say most people think learning is a passive activity -- happens when someone is teaching you, or forcing you to learn.
That in turn reminds me of a British reality TV series from the 2000s called "Faking It". Participants were trained by experts in a specific skill that they had no existing knowledge of, and then they had to convince others that they were genuinely skilled in that area, which they almost always did.
It was "fake it 'till you make it" condensed into a single episode. Loved that show!
Interesting how different the things we're reminded of are: I was thinking of a maxim Feynman liked, "What one fool can do, another can." (Not sure if it's original to him; my memory suggests it might've been from one of the calculus book he read as a teen.)
Yeah. I clued into this at some point. I think it came to a head when I had a washer start making a lot of noise and behaving badly. I thought, "The worst thing you can do is break it more, these things were designed to be repaired by other humans with a manual, humans who might not have even gone to college, gasp."
So I ordered the manual and the parts I thought needed replacement and went at it. Boom, done.
Something else I find encouraging, and the reason, basically, that "everything is learnable" is that all knowledge, no matter how complex, is composed of fundamentally simple parts. Just as complex tasks or complex movements are composed of many simple steps or movements.
This is what makes the maxim that "you don't understand something unless you can explain it in simple terms" true.
Yes, and this has its limits. Many true experts in their fields would struggle to explain their field simply. I like to think I'm an expert in my work, but how many times have I explained to my wife what I do in simple terms, and she still has no idea what I do?
Complex ideas often get distorted or lost in simple explanations.
I think the limits are mainly a matter of time and mental energy. While quantum physics is ultimately composed of many simple concepts, the number is so large that it takes years to enumerate them all.
You could explain your work to your wife in terms simple and exhaustive enough for her to fully understand. It would just take a longer time and more concentration than either of you wants to expend.
Absolutely. And most things most people work on today are complex. To do my job I need to understand 100 different things. Not a single one is difficult. But to explain it in simple terms simply isn't possible because it's not 1 or 2 big things.
When people explain things in simple terms, they are often either borderline lying, or tucking an exceptionally large tree of concepts under a single word or phrase.
My French knowledge is a little rusty but I was under the impression there would be no phonetic difference between monde and mondes (and possibly fait and faite, though I'm less sure about that).
I think this post does a great job of arguing against its own thesis. This woman was apparently the rank one poker player in the world. She obviously has great natural ability and works hard at what she does. So why doesn't she stick with anything for longer than a few years? Why has she had an impressive start to four or five different careers without following through on any of them to real greatness?
She believes, or wants us to believe, that her personality has helped her overcome her modest abilities. Instead it seems that her immense natural ability has overcome a personality that should by all rights have led her to ruin.
It's often said that to be outstanding, you should master two different fields then work at the intersection of those fields. For a lot of people the model of "real greatness" is Leonardo, who mastered about 7 fields.
To even get close to that you need to be the sort of person who changes fields every 5 years or so. I think this temperament is relatively fixed, perhaps because it's a feature of some kinds of neurodivergence. If ND and innate ability are both fixed, what you need to reach greatness is a bag of tricks like the author has so you optimise the many parts of personality and behaviour that are not fixed.
What I think is sad about modern times is, it's increasingly difficult and impractical to make a career change into a regulated profession. You can switch to CS, painting, or poker any old time. But if you're not a doctor by the time you're 40, forget about it. I bump into many people who are interested in medicine and would be great at it, but the switching cost is insurmountable. A shame because there's so much greatness to unlock at the intersection of CS, medical research, and clinical practice.
There has to be a high correlation between people who get bored and move on and people who can learn things fast (either by technique/personality or raw iq points or both).
Good article! I am in a phase of life where I'd prefer to be less "agentic", and more of a mindless automaton, always doing the tasks I set out to do myself in a day.
What stands between me and most of my current goals is nothing but investments of time - hundreds, thousands of hours of time. There is no money component, and I cannot significantly accelerate my progress on any of them using money either. My agency isn't going to go anywhere, in fact it reasserts itself annoyingly often with flights of fancy and going back to focusing purely on making money. But I do wish I could tell it to shut up and just let me focus on the grind more often.
Language learning, endurance biking, weight loss, and meditation at this point. (EDIT: some physical wound healing too, forgot about that)
Quitting alcohol was also a very similar battle after a decade of increasingly severe abuse of it. I had my last drink 467 days ago, and for the first 6 months or so basically the only things I had the mental fortitude to juggle were "don't lose my job" and "don't succumb to the bottle". Much easier said than done to willingly remove the one coping mechanism you could rely on all throughout NEETdom to graduating from a top university with honors, but I did it, thank goodness.
So refreshing, and timely. Diving into the moat of low status is a huge multiplier. Courting rejection is a super power because when success is explosive and non-linear, it favours the players who make the most attempts, and not the hardest ones.
Timely because it's not just winter, I hit a really hard personal low over the last few months. This article reminded me that I do hard, scary, and difficult things, and my lows get none of the consolations of mediocrity. I do them because once you are good at hard things, you get untouchable confidence founded on genuine humility of having crossed the moat of low status, which translates into other parts of your life. The lows are when you lose sight of that, and thank you for helping to put this back in perspective.
My point is to help you not forget your compassion. All this talk about agency is nothing if you don’t have the luck to go along with it. So if you see someone who’s homeless, don’t talk to them about their agency. Just help them.
Trivializing homelessness like this doesn't help, and I strongly disagree that "agency is nothing" to unhoused people. There are many free resources available, but the organizations providing them often don't have the capacity to efficiently allocate them to those in need, due to difficulties with reach, etc.
Escaping poverty is a function of others' generosity (luck) but also agency; you can't do it without some amount of self-belief and proactivity and exposing yourself to opportunities for aid. But it's very difficult and a lot of people give up.
In my family, my mother always called this as "Reality Bending" (no relation to airbender) -- but they referred to Jobs' "reality distortion field"
My father had this to great effect.
My brother has it to a certain degree.
I used to have it in spades when I was younger - but I have become "will-power" complacent in my older years, which snowballs into to depression.
I certainly feel getting dumber as I age - which is in part to the fact that I had a vast amount of information relating to my job when I was younger in my head - but now a ton of the knowledge I once had on quick access is simply obsolete.
Here is a quick example.
When I was ~20 someone I knew had accidentally changed ALL the display UI elements in Windows 95 to black.
Just by memory I could hit start and navigate to settings and display and fixed it back to normal - all by memory.
I couldnt even tell you where any of those setting were as fast on W95 today even if I had the machine in front of me and access to google.
Your Windows 95 story definitely resonates. I installed Windows XP so many times that I had not only the pirated key memorized, but I would start moving my mouse toward the next button before it had even appeared on screen. People used to be impressed at how fast I could find the "Eastern Time Zone" option in the combo box.
This article really spoke to me, but, ironically, I am concerned about my ability to put it into practice.
I feel like there are areas of my life I have extreme agency over and others I have no agency over. I hate it because the areas I feel I lack agency in run counter to my sense of self. Things I struggle to do don't feel like things I should struggle to do. I wonder if this is something I learned when I was young?
Some examples:
* I live on my own in SF. I moved to California after college and confidently left my small hometown without much support.
* I've led teams of engineers in fast-paced startup environments and gotten us to exceptional results. I wouldn't bat an eye at interviewing technical executives.
* I've quit my job, repeatedly, without backups in place, to pursue technical side projects that sound meaningful to me until I run ~out of money.
* I've led groups of 50+ people through week-long music festivals, coordinating all the people, money, accommodations, etc.
* I can confidently speak to large groups of people without feeling self-conscious.
* I've travelled alone, internationally, for work and everything went great and without cause for concern.
And yet...:
* I learned to drive at 32. I'm still "scared" of the concept, don't own a vehicle, and haven't integrated driving into my lifestyle.
* I can make a down-payment on a house, but continue to rent because it sounds big and scary to do such a thing.
* I "fall into" relationships and jobs rather than actively evaluating my wants, pursuing them, contrasting varying options, etc.
* I would never dream of travelling alone, internationally, by myself just to do a thing. It sounds scary doing it for myself, but doing it for work sounds trivial.
* I'm very prone to overthinking situations and trying to solve them in my head before taking a small, tangible step forward with physical actions. This feels similar to lacking agency -- like I would trust myself to gain agency but only once I'm confident I've seen where taking action will take me.
Sometimes I feel like I don't understand myself because I feel like all of these issues should be in the same class. I've done things others feel are challenging, but struggle to apply that same mindset to tasks I know others find trivial. Does this mean I am lacking in agency? Does this mean I just have weird standards for myself? Or is it something else entirely?
IMO, everything in your "and yets" except relationships and overthinking sound like ordinary preferences, rather than lack of agency. Like, if you actively want to change those preferences and haven't, maybe that's less agentic, but they seem reasonable to me. Although I'm biased because I share some of those traits.
And the other two I would personally consider in meaningfully different categories than your successes, so maybe they're just not in line with your strengths (yet).
Perhaps agency is less one single 'meta-skill' than a bunch of domain specific 'micro-skills'. E.g., strategic thinking in a tech company leadership roll is one skill (or set of skills), strategic thinking in the context of a personal relationship is another skill (or set of skills); managing fear in the context of public speaking is one skill (or set of skills), managing fear in the context of driving is another skill (or set of skills).
Sometimes skills that seem superficially similar are surprisingly non-transferable and context specific.
Ultimately, I think that the most generally applicable advice is getting feedback from others, getting an outside view, blindspot fuzzing, etc. Bottlenecks are usually not the obvious things, because usually the obvious things have been tried, without success. [That is, until the obvious thing is so obvious that everyone assumes it has been tried before without actually trying it. In which case it is again non-obvious!]
Personally, I have found that in personal relationships, a fairly effective strategy to get "unstuck" is to take actions that seem bizarre, unimaginable, or otherwise far outside the distribution of my ordinary responses. I do this because usually if I feel stuck, or there is some unpleasant dynamic, then a part of that dynamic that keeps it going is my actions, which are based in what I tend to do. If I find myself in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th iteration of something unpleasant that I feel like has played out before, I'll do something far outside the distribution of my ordinary actions, and it has a much better chance of getting me unstuck (though, it still might only be a 1%-10% chance of getting me unstuck per random action).
Perhaps there is some sort of general algorithm in that for getting unstuck. A sort of exhaustive process of elimination, with some sort of outside generativity, and some feedback loops grounded in reality, that is one's best chance at escaping local optima.
I am feeling the same way. It makes me get confused about myself a lot. I think it is ok that, I can fear from or fail at things that are easy for other people while something that is hard for the most people can be trivial for me.
I liked the author’s idea of finding rough edges that other people don’t want to deal with. Unlike the author, I have always been a bit of a slacker, working just part time most of my life. That said, I do think that when I do work I like rough edges! Good read.
I feel like what I actually need to have more agency is just money or rich connections that want to give me money. Since I'm broke, not very healthy, and isolated, I am just trying to get by. My ambition (in some sense) is probably about a billion times greater than my means, however.
Side topic, I understand "agency/agentic" means "taking matter at own hand" but I have problem understanding why. In principal-agent problem [1], an agent is someone acting on principal's behalf. Conflicts arise when the doer, the agent, has more influence to the result, which the result may not align with that of a principal. Shouldn't having more "agency" means acting on people's behalf on steroids? Why one would want to have more "agency" instead of "being your own principal"?
Agreed that it's confusing. In case it helps, the concepts you're conflating are "agent-y" as an adjective (i.e. agent-like, for others) and "agency" the abstract noun for the quality of being a good agent for oneself.
I wish the author had included concrete examples of finding edges (and the process of finding them). I wonder if anyone here has an example from their experience?
One way is seeing if the predictions you make repeatedly come true in some domain, especially if they go against the general consensus. Is so, it means you have an edge in that domain - you see things more clearly than others or have original insights. Now think about your current predictions about that domain, and see if you can act on them somehow.
One definition of an edge is knowing something other people don't. You have to be careful not to fool yourself.
She talked about physical reads as an edge and gave two aspects of finding the edge.
a) she put herself in a room with her adversaries, the other poker players, and paid attention to how their behavior correlated with their hands
b) she brought up what she noticed and was discounted by other players.
These are two excellent components of an edge:
1) primary data and repeated experience
2) watching the consensus reject that data
Data scientists go through a stage called EDA, or exploratory data analysis, where they just play around and look at the shape of data. From that, they can begin to form conjectures and dig further to validate or refute their hypothesis. Cate was doing that IRL.
I think the connotations are a little different. Self-confidence can include a sort of complacency (confidence in what you're currently doing), whereas agency seems to be more a will to figure things out, whatever it takes.
Self-confidence is helpful alongside agency, but I think it's a totally different concept.
Agency is about self-awareness and realizing that you have a choice. Lack of agency means going along with the default, societal script or what is handed to you even if it is not a good option for you.
One example is dropping out of a university program, even if you are capable of graduating. There is a strong social expectation that you finish, but maybe you don't like it, or your time is better spent elsewhere. Agency is that realization that you can choose.
Yes but self confidence works against all this when it doesn’t come with awareness and humility around what you don’t know. You need self skepticism about opinions and new knowledge but confidence around ability to perform actions.
> Someone recently asked me how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits.
The classic is How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie -- highly recommended. If you're young and looking for something more helpful in romance, watch Before Sunrise.
> and the number one female poker player in the world
If the author was that then contrary to the thesis of their blog post they are an outlier in that they have unusually high raw mental power / intelligence in at least some dimensions of intelligence. This means that, in fact, other people cannot follow in their footsteps because those other people are not lucky enough to have a brain like hers. The reason they don't have a brain as good as hers might be genetics but is much more likely to be that they didn't have educated parents with books on the shelves who established a culture and expectations of academic achievement. In other words, sorry, but TFA is the same tired old right wing bullshit / American Dream crap of anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they work hard enough. (And I'm saying that as a wokery-hating centre-rightist!)
It’s widely known but many pros consider it to be of low importance compared with “hand reading”, which is more about putting someone in a play-style bucket based on the hands you observe and then deducing what hand range they are likely to hold from their actions in the hand up to that point. Physical tells are typically considered as unreliable compared to this unless they are really obvious. Amateurs tend to overestimate the importance of tells vs. hand reading.
Right. If you're already really good at hand reading, you might get some extra edge in working to improve your physical reads, but otherwise looking for subtle tells will probably just make you play even worse.
In elite games, you would assume everyone is an expert at hand reading, so it makes sense that physical reads would become more important.
Tells are something you see more of in “movie” poker rather than real poker. Most poker guides (as the OP alludes) discourage tell based play unless you are playing with people you are very familiar with and have studied over time. Even then, it’s a bit of a crapshoot as opponents can use this against you (“did he scratch his temple because he has a poor hand or because he wants me to think he has a poor hand?”)
The one suggestion that I do find helpful is not to look at your cards as they are dealt but instead look at your opponents’ faces as they look at theirs. Sometimes their micro-expressions betray them before they regain composure.
There are some interesting points in there, but the author sounds like a bit of a narcissistic jerk.
> In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it. You also want to make it easy to find -- I have a link to my feedback form in my Twitter bio, and get a few comments a week through it.
> I imagine resistance from some people on the grounds that anonymity frees people to be assholes, but in my experience they rarely are. 90% of what I get in my inbox is either nonsense or nice -- I get lots of “keep up the good work!” type messages
So 10% are assholes, and the rest are "nonsense" or nice - does she get any actual criticism in her "feedback inbox" (kind of a strange concept in my opinion in itself)?
Also, all of the accomplishments she bragged about in the intro are from business. Impressive as they may be, it seems a bit narrow minded to be only focusing on that part of life when recounting what you are most proud of.
You got flagged bc you’re a jerk about it. For what it’s worth. If you come to disagree and have a civil discussion that’s typically fine. But your posts are condescending and needlessly inflammatory.
I don't think so. There are a lot of people in these kind of threads that always try to redefine words to fit their world view (which is more often than not the just world hypothesis in a nutshell). It's typical of the american/wantrepreneur mentality and bias. Downvotes are performative and it's useless to go against the current in this case.
Dude, I’m on the edges. You know that uncomfortable place where no one likes to go. Just because you don’t like what I’m saying doesn’t mean I’m being a jerk about it. And if you can point out anything specific in a comment that was flagged, I would appreciate it.
This aversion to the effect of luck is just making me realize how deluded many people are in the tech industry. And how they fell under the spell of lucky people who are successful, telling you it’s not about luck.
Fair play. I was working off the links and context from this thread and did not think to look at anyone's twitter bio.
Anyways, the argument you seem to be making (I may have it wrong) is that you can dismiss Cate's article on agency because she also admits to be lucky. That may explain why successful people, both in and out of tech, are hesitant to acknowledge the role of luck.
There is that old lottery promo "you can't win if you don't play". There is this quote: "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take. Even though there is only a 1-5% probably of scoring". There is the saying 9 times down 10 times up.
Getting lucky is a function of trying, as well. Saying you have to get "lucky" isn't about luck, it's about a mentality of keep at it.
Playing the lottery versus not playing the lottery doesn’t change your luck, it changes your odds.
If two people play the lottery the same amount of times and one person wins way more than the other, You would say one person was luckier than the other.
The meaning of the word lucky has shifted over time as we stopped believing that certain people have things go their way more often than average because fate, the gods, or whatever favors them.
I had stopped believing in fate, too—until I learned that (popular astrology app) Co-Star makes heavy use of Haskell[1]. So since they got my horoscope to compile, it’s probably correct.
Success is always based on luck. With hard work you can increase your odds to win, but anyway it is about the luck.
Anyone who is successful by your standards was lucky enough to born free in a good wealthy society. They could born and live as slaves in Africa and work for food and shelter without any chances to be successful.
Who says I’m not taking charge of life? I just know the role that luck has to play in life as well. That way when I’m not lucky I don’t keep all that blame on myself or when other people are unlucky I don’t blame them for their failures. Because who the hell knows?
Just saying that blaming one’s own or other people’s success on luck will always lead to suboptimal outcomes for the blamer. Good and bad events will happen one way or another, and it’s up to each one of us to make the most of it.
Therefore, if you think luck is the main determinant of outcomes, you’ll try much less hard.
High achievers getting zero credit. Moping losers blaming their failures on “bad luck”. Zero reason to strive for greatness because you’ll get sympathy if you fail and jealousy if you succeed.
Let me tell you how I would see it. High achievers, knowing that they’re successful based on lock would be more helpful to people who didn’t have good luck. This would turn out to be a more stable and even society.
I guess you like the separation of wealth we’re experiencing right now?
Sadly, without a strong impetus to strive upward, there won’t be any high achievers to mooch off of or blame when things go wrong.
Everyone gets a steady stream of good luck and bad luck. Consistently sailing upstream towards success takes a lot of grit and determination, something completely lacking in the minds of those who think they’re at the mercy of their circumstances.
I’ve been helped by many, deserved and undeserved.
But to remove the role of agency from success is an overreaction.
The extreme right says life is a perfec meritocracy. The extreme left says it’s all down to luck and power dynamics. As usual, they are both wrong and it’s a healthy mix of both.
But since agency is the only thing you control, it’s best to focus on that.
On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles - whatever one may choose to call them - we know: the best of us did not return.
I'm frequently astonished by the sheer force of some people's desire to be unhappy.
Viktor Frankl is an amazing example of someone taking an absolutely shit situation and applying some agency to it to make it better. My entire point is even he had good and bad luck, and chose not to focus on that, but on his zone of control, his agency.
If it is in fact your contention that Viktor Frankl - Viktor Frankl - was lucky, then there's really no point in any further discussion.
What’s with all the woo hoo here on HN? The very definition of the word luck goes against your “frame it on the wall” feely good saying.
“success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.”
but I guess you’re also saying that people who get cancer are just letting it happen? Maybe they should’ve investigated the edges. You see there are two types of luck, good luck and bad luck. How do you know if by increasing your good luck in one area you’re not increasing your bad luck in another?
In these comments your agency is entirely aimed at negativity. In order to justify this you reframe it as realism.
It's kind of like walking outside with your attention constantly focused on the fact that you might step on dog shit.
If you do this, your agency is pulled away from appreciating a beautiful flower, or interchanging smiles with a pretty person, or seeing a hundred dollar bill off to the side.
The fact that it is true that you can step on dog shit doesn't make it more true than the fact that most of the time you don't step on dog shit, and that you have the agency to walk and go around as if you weren't going to step on dog shit today.
Your interpretation of my comments is negative. I’m not saying you can’t change your opportunity in life, I’m saying that if luck has anything to do with your success or failure, then it’s all based on luck, and nothing to do with what opportunities you create.
It may will be that I do everything wrong in life and limit my opportunities, and still win the lottery because I tripped and fell on my face and lo and behold there was a winning lottery ticket that someone misplaced.
What I am saying over and over again is increasing your odds of success. Does not change your luck. Just like you cannot change the fact if a coin lands on heads or tails. You have zero agency in that outcome.
> I’m saying that if luck has anything to do with your success or failure, then it’s all based on luck, and nothing to do with what opportunities you create.
Your statement excessively (because it’s non-predictively useless) reductionist.
Yep, it’s absolute luck that that particular sperm and ovum happened to combine, that the pregnancy successfully proceeded, that you were born in a country not at war (I’m guessing), that that car didn’t run off the road and squash you when you were eight, etc. But acknowledging all that doesn’t provide any guidance.
My “woo woo” statement was literally the case: yes some incredible opportunity could sweep by and be missed because you happened to be looking the other way. And that will definitely happen — tant pis. But if you are willing to consider lucky opportunities when you are looking the other way your odds will improve.
Cate views her own life through a frame of responsibility: she takes responsibility for what happens to her. At the same time, she is genuinely not proud, and genuinely doesn’t think she’s better than anyone else. She credits luck for her good fortune and unusual attributes more than anything else, and is compassionate and curious toward everyone we meet. This is, I think, what sticks with me most.
The way I frame luck in my mind is that there will always be elements of your success which lie outside of your control. The ability to which you can capitalize on opportunities which come from outside of your of control is contingent on factors of your life which exist within the boundaries of your control.
You may have been lucky because a recruiter has reached out to you for a role which you would fit well in, but that's because you've made a conscious effort in dedicating time your craft and to advertising your capabilities.
Luck (or the lack of) is nearly never the sole factor in your successes or your failures.
“ Cate views her own life through a frame of responsibility: she takes responsibility for what happens to her. At the same time, she is genuinely not proud, and genuinely doesn’t think she’s better than anyone else. She credits luck for her good fortune and unusual attributes more than anything else, and is compassionate and curious toward everyone we meet. This is, I think, what sticks with me most.”
Cate highlights positive aspects. Again, your posts focus every time on negativity. This is the point that I'm trying to get across. You talked about cancer, about blame and failure, "doing everything wrong in life and still winning the lottery" (winning the lottery isn't inherently positive, because it's what you do with it that matters).
It is not luck that shifts your mind to highlight these negative aspects, that is where agency takes place. Take care.
It is a numbers game. And by increasing the number of chances to "play", you increase the probability of scoring (i.e. "increase your luck surface area").
> How do you know if by increasing your good luck in one area you’re not increasing your bad luck in another?
I think you do know. Eat healthy and move => most likely will increase the probability of be able to be more active at an older age. Build and launch projects => increase the probability of building a profitable business (but if doing that makes you burnout - sure, you could say you increased your "bad luck" from a health perspective)
Respectfully, I find your definition of luck more "woo woo" than everyone else's.
I might be misunderstanding your point, but other people are treating luck as mere chance or odds, while you seem to me to be treating it as something binary that sounds a bit like "destiny" or "predeterminism".
Yes, at any point in time, you can be lucky or unlucky.
By changing the odds of an outcome, you’re not changing your luck, you’re changing the odds. Even having 99.999% certainty you can still be unlucky and land in that percent. Probability is not deterministic. And what determines the outcome? Luck.
So that definition you keep posting doesn't say what you're saying it says. That which is apparently not caused by one's actions might, in fact, be largely caused by one's actions. Yes, there are things that are not in your ability to control and perhaps you could call that "true luck", but even your given definition admits labeling things that can be affected by personal actions as luck.
You can directly control the amount of luck you receive:
“Your Luck Surface Area, is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated.”
The very definition of the word luck goes against what you’re saying.
“success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.”
This is a saying that sounds good, but makes no sense. For example, how do you change your luck of getting a coin to flip 90% of the time on tails?
So you would say that one was lucky if they flipped a coin 10 times and nine times out of 10 It landed on tails when they needed it to land on tails. But you know what? If they needed it to land on heads those nine out of 10 times they would be unlucky.
What you all are talking about is not luck, it’s opportunity. You can increase your opportunity, but your luck never changes.
You can’t control the outcome of the coin flip, but you can control how many times you flip the coin.
Increasing the surface area of luck is about fostering opportunities to flip a coin
Just simple stuff like showing up to work every day. Going to social events. Networking. Taking classes. These will increase the opportunities you have to flip the coin.
Thinking there’s a fixed number of flips in life is false and really a poor way of thinking.
That’s my point. That’s my only point. The outcome is still always every time going to depend on luck. Because you can flip that coin 100 times and it could land on heads every time when you wanted tails. Is it unlikely? Yes, is it impossible? No.
No, you’re wrong, luck isn’t helped by anything. It’s just luck. You can change all the opportunities you want but if you have bad luck you have bad luck if you have good luck you have good luck.
If I go to a job interview and at the end of it, the person says “ok, I’m gonna flip this coin — guess the outcome and you get the job”. I guess — I miss.
Then they say “want to guess again?”
Repeat until I get the job.
Probability has an effect on outcomes, but only insofar as the chances you’re willing to take. Luck is just an observation of a single outcome.
You’re artificially predicting a positive outcome. You said “repeat until I get the job“. But you could be very unlucky person and keep sitting there flipping and flipping the coin and never guessing right. I’m not saying to not keep trying. I’m saying your certainty of positive outcome is false.
It seems like you’re just being obstinate. At some point in the game, you’re going to be so unlucky that it’s improbable you don’t succeed. If I’m making an absurd claim, you’re doing exactly the same thing.
You’re not making an absurd claim at all and I agree with it. But you’re still using the same term which denotes the need for luck, that term is improbable. By saying it’s improbable you’re not saying it’s a certainty, so therefore luck is still a factor in your success.
No, I didn’t miss the point of the article, I’m expressing the fact that she totally negates luck in anyone’s life circumstances, that it is all about agency. After all, you have to have some amount of luck to have agency in the first place.
If luck is a stable quantity for a given individual and it's range is ]-1,1[ you are right.
But if luck is a quantity that fluctuate and is positively biased, (a reasonable a priori seeing that most people succeed at something) or that it's range is ]0,1[ , you are wrong and willful exposure to opportunities increase your total amount of wins.
Why are you saying that luck is positively based question. And what’s your definition of success.? I mean I put my coffee cup down on a table, do I count that as success?
I think Podgajski is trying to make the following argument:
Assume a standard 2-axes scatter plot, with a randomly placed horizontal line that represents chance/luck. The scattered points represent opportunities.
Any opportunity that occurs above the luck line is successful, anything below it is unsuccessful.
Above a given threshold of luck, maximizing opportunities is a good strategy because there's a high likelihood they'll pay off.
But if your luck is too low, then maximizing opportunities will still result in a larger number of successes, but at a much greater cost. A more efficient strategy might be to invest more resources in the successes you actually get.
I'm not picking a side here, just trying to bridge a potential disconnect in the discussion. Podgajski, please correct me if I've misrepresented your position
Kind of but not really. But truly thank you for hearing what I’m saying. What I’m not saying is that people have good or bad luck in general. That you have a predetermined amount of luck.
Maybe this can simplify it even more. You have no agency deciding whether a coin lands on heads or tails. We would say someone is lucky if they said a coin will land on heads more than tails and they were right.
If Someone can explain to me how you can change your agency without physically manipulating the coin then have it. And these random things happen every day in our lives.
And I’m not even saying don’t try for success, I’m just saying, don’t listen to these people who talk about success like it’s something that you can achieve without being on your side.
The truth is you don’t have 100% agency in your life and you never will. It’s impossible. So since you don’t have 100% agency, the rest is up to luck. Good or bad luck whatever it is I’m not being negative here.
Few people are constantly unlucky, like, day after day after day. Most of our lives are stochastic enough that luck and bad luck, on average, balance out. A random walk in both directions.
"Oh, and being rich helps your agency quite a lot." - Yeah, if you can manage your wealth, but if a stupid person somehow gets a lot of money, my bet would be on them losing those in spectacular way within a few years.
