This is my first Article.
Warren Buffett, the multi-billionaire investor, offered a thought experiment in 1997. “Imagine a genie appears to you 24 hours before you are about to be born,” he explained.
“The genie claims that you have complete control over the laws of the civilization you are going to enter, and that you can create whatever you wish. You get to create the social, economic, and governmental rules. And those rules will stand for the rest of your life, your children's lives, and your grandchildren's lives.”
“However, there is a catch,” he explained.
“You never know whether you'll be born in the United States or Afghanistan, affluent or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied. You only know that you get to pick one ball from a barrel containing 5.8 billion balls. And you're the one.”
“In other words, you're going to take part in what I call the Ovarian Lottery,” Buffett explains. And that is the most significant event that will ever occur in your life. It will decide a lot more than where you go to school, how hard you work, and other things.”
It's difficult to dispute the relevance of chance, unpredictability, and good fortune in life when stated this way. These elements do, in fact, have an important influence. But suppose a different scenario.
Project 523's Backstory
Tu Youyou, a Chinese scientist, was appointed the director of a covert research lab in Beijing in 1969, during the fourteenth year of the Vietnam War. Project 523 was the only code name for the unit. Project 523 was intended to research antimalarial drugs that could be provided to the soldiers by China, which was a Vietnam ally. The sickness has grown into a major issue. Malaria was killing as many Vietnamese soldiers in the bush as it was killing them in battle. Tu began her investigation by hunting for clues wherever she could. She studied traditional traditional treatments in manuals. She combed through hundreds or thousands of years' worth of ancient manuscripts. She journeyed to far-flung locations in quest of herbs that may provide a cure. Her team had gathered over 600 plants and developed a list of almost 2,000 probable treatments after months of investigation. Tu whittled down the list of prospective drugs to 380 and tested each one on lab mice one at a time. “This was the most difficult part of the project,” she explained. “It was a really difficult and time-consuming job, especially when you were dealing with failure after failure."
Thousands of experiments were carried out. The majority of them generated no results. However, one experiment, using an extract from the sweet wormwood plant known as qinghao, appeared to be promising. Tu was ecstatic about the prospect, but despite her best efforts, the plant would only produce a potent antimalarial drug on rare occasions. It wouldn't always be successful. The problem was the heat. The active substance in the sweet wormwood plant would be lost if the temperature was too high during the extraction procedure. Tu recreated the experiment using lower boiling point solvents, and she eventually came up with an antimalarial medicine that worked 100% of the time.
It was a big step forward, but the hard job had only just begun.
The Influence of Hard Work
It was now time for human trials, with a validated drug in hand. Unfortunately, at the time, there were no centers in China conducting drug studies. Going to a facility outside of the nation was out of the question owing to the project's exclusivity.
They'd reached a fork in the road.
Tu volunteered to be the first human subject to take the drug at that point. She and two other members of Project 523 infected themselves with malaria and got the first doses of their new medication in one of the most daring gestures in medical history.
It was successful.
Tu was barred from sharing her discoveries with the outside world despite her discovery of a breakthrough drug and her readiness to put her own life on the line. The Chinese government has severe regulations prohibiting the publication of any scientific data. She was unafraid. Tu persisted in her studies, eventually deducing the medicine's molecular structure—a substance known as artemisinin—and going on to discover a second antimalarial medicine. Tu's art was ultimately revealed to the outside world in 1978, over a decade after she began and three years after the Vietnam War ended. She'd have to wait until the year 2000 for the World Health Organization to endorse the medication as a malaria defense.
The artemisinin medication has now been given to malaria patients over 1 billion times. Millions of lives are said to have been saved as a result of it. Tu Youyou is the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize, as well as the first Chinese person to win the Lasker Award for outstanding contributions to medical science.
Do you believe in luck or hard work?
Tu Youyou didn't have a lot of luck. My favorite feature about her is that she has no postgraduate degree, no international research experience, and no membership in any of China's national academies, earning her the moniker "The Professor of the Three Nos." She is a dedicated employee. Persistent, conscientious, and determined. She didn't quit up for decades, and as a consequence, she helped save millions of lives. Her tale is a fantastic illustration of the value of hard effort in reaching success. Just a moment ago, it seemed logical that the Ovarian Lottery dictated the majority of your life success, but now it seems as logical that hard effort mattered. When you work hard, you are more likely to get better outcomes than if you put in less effort. While we cannot dispute the significance of luck, everyone seem to believe that hard work makes a difference.
So, what exactly is it? What factors influence one's ability to succeed? Is it luck or hard work? Is it a matter of effort or chance? I believe we can all agree that both elements have a part, but I'd want to provide you with a more detailed response than "it depends."
Here are two perspectives on the problem that I have.
Absolute Success and Relative Success
One approach to respond to this issue is to state that luck is more important in the absolute sense, while hard work is more important in the relative sense. The absolute viewpoint analyzes your degree of achievement in comparison to others. What distinguishes someone as the finest in the world at something? When seen from this perspective, success is almost always due to chance. Even if you make a solid first choice, such as Bill Gates' decision to establish a computer firm, you won't be able to comprehend all of the aspects that lead to world-class results. The more severe and unusual the circumstances that led to the success, the more likely it was. It's usually a mix of the right genes, the appropriate connections, the perfect time, and a thousand other factors that no one can foresee.
The more severe and unusual the circumstances that led to the success, the more likely it was.
Then there's the relative perspective, which examines your level of achievement in comparison to others in your field. What about the millions of people who had comparable educational backgrounds, lived up in comparable communities, or were born with comparable amounts of genetic talent? These folks aren't getting the same outcomes as you are. The more local the comparison, the more hard effort is required to succeed. When you compare yourself to others who have had equal amounts of good fortune, the difference lies in your habits and decisions.
Absolute success is a result of chance. Choices and behaviors determine relative success.
This definition reveals a key insight: as outcomes get more severe, the role of luck becomes more essential. That is, if you grow more successful in a broad sense, we may ascribe a bigger percentage of your success to chance.
Both accounts are true.
People may struggle to hold both of these insights at the same time. There's a propensity to talk about results in either a global or local context. The absolute viewpoint is more expansive. What accounts for the disparity between an affluent American born child and a child born into extreme poverty who lives on less than $1 a day? People say things like, "How can you not perceive your privilege?" when discussing achievement from this perspective. Don't you know how much you've been given?”
The relative perspective is more localized. What accounts for the disparity in performance between you and everyone else who attended the same school, grew up in the same area, and worked for the same company? People say things like, "Are you kidding me?" while discussing success from a local perspective.
The Path to Success
Another approach to look at the balance between luck and hard work is to look at how success is impacted through time. Consider the possibility of plotting success on a graph. The Y-axis represents success. The X-axis represents time. The y-intercept is determined by the ball you pull from Buffett's Ovarian Lottery when you are born. Those who are born with good fortune start at the top of the graph. Those who are born into difficult circumstances have a lower starting point.
The important thing to remember is that you can only determine the slope of your success, not your starting position.
“It doesn't matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now,” I wrote in Atomic Habits. What matters is whether or if your habits are leading you to success. Your present direction should be significantly more important to you than your existing results.”
You can only influence the trajectory of your achievement, not your starting point.
You might even be able to reclaim ground lost due to bad luck if you have a positive slope and enough time and effort. “The longer time passes from the start of a race, the less the head start others have matters,” I felt this phrase summed it up nicely. Of course, this isn't always the case. A serious sickness can completely devastate your health. Your retirement funds might be ruined if your pension fund collapses. Similarly, chance can occasionally provide a long-term advantage (or disadvantage). Indeed, one research revealed that if income is a measure of success, the most successful people are virtually always those with average talent and exceptional luck.
In any event, the two are inextricably linked. They are both vital, and hard labor typically takes on a greater significance as time passes.
This applies not just to overcome poor luck, but also to maximizing good fortune. Bill Gates was extremely lucky to found Microsoft at the perfect period in history, but the chance would have been squandered without decades of hard labor. Every advantage is eroded with time. If success is to be sustained, good luck must eventually give way to hard labor.
How to Attract Good Fortune
Luck is, by definition, out of your control. Even so, knowing what function it plays and how it works might help you prepare for when good fortune (or bad fortune) comes your way. Richard Hamming, a mathematician and computer engineer, summed what it takes to produce outstanding work in his amazing address, You and Your Research, by saying, "There is definitely an element of chance, and no, there isn't." The prepared mind will eventually discover something significant to accomplish and will do it. So, yeah, it's a case of good fortune. It's luck that you do what you do, but it's not luck that you do something.”
By taking action, you may enhance your surface area for good luck. A forager who travels around will come across a lot of worthless terrain, but he or she is also more likely to come across a plentiful berry patch than someone who stays at home. Similarly, someone who works hard, chases opportunities, and tries a variety of things is more likely to strike it rich than someone who waits. “The harder I practice, the luckier I get,” stated Gary Player, a legendary golfer who has won nine major championships.
Finally, we have no influence over our luck, good or bad, but we do have control over our work and preparedness. From time to time, luck shines on us all. And when it occurs, the best way to show your gratitude is to work hard and make the most of your good fortune.
