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I’m not removing the role of agency from success, as long as luck is on your side.



I wonder what someone like Viktor Frankl would think of all this.


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.

Viktor E. Frankl

He would say he was lucky.


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.


I’m not calling him lucky, he called himself lucky. I literally just showed you the quote where he said he was lucky.

I’m not demeaning his agency everything is written but if he wasn’t lucky, we wouldn’t be able to read anything he wrote about his experience.


Great! You've circled your way around to agreeing with me.

A man in the most unlucky circumstances looked for the ways in which he was indeed lucky, and then went on to turn that into a good outcome.

Pure agency. Luck had nothing to do with it.




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