Absolute and relative success

 First example

Warren Buffett (no introduction needed) once proposed a thought experiment in 1997. He said that suppose a genie comes 24 hours before you are to be born and gives you the boon to fix the rules of the society, the governmental rules and the economic rules you are about to be born into and you are free to make any rules. The rules will be applicable to you, your children as well as your grand children.

But it has a catch. You don’t know whether you will be born a male or female, rich or poor, able bodied or disabled and also you don’t know which country you will be born, USA or Afghanistan. You will be just one out of the 5.8 billion.

He called it a lottery and it is going to be the most important thing in your life. In his 2014 annual letter he wrote that it was pure luck that he and his business partner were born in America in the right time, and he was forever grateful that this accident of birth gave an immense advantage to both of them.

Buffett gives credit to his luck. Reading this it seems that luck, good fortune plays an important part in our lives.

Second example

In 1969 during the Vietnam War a Chinese scientist was detailed to make an anti malarial medicine as lot of soldiers were dying due to malaria. The scientist named Tu read hundreds of ancient texts and travelled to many places and collected 600 plants and 2000 possible remedies to experiment with. She then narrowed it down to 380 potential medications and tested them on mice one by one. It was a tedious job with one after the other failures. After months of testing one plant named qinghao showed some promise. But the problem was it only occasionally produced the anti malarial medication and won’t work all the time.

It was already two years and she decided to start from the beginning again. She again read all the ancient texts to see if she missed something. At last in a 1500 years old text, a single sentence gave her the clue. The problem was the heat. If the extract was extracted in high temperature then the medication would not work. So she again ran experiments by lowering the boiling temperature during extraction and ultimately found the extract that would work 100 percent times.

As it was a secret project so the clinical trials could not be conducted. So she and her assistant decided to test on themselves. They infected themselves with malaria and then tried the new drug. The medicine worked. In spite of the humongous effort and risking their lives, she was not allowed to publish her work to the outside world. It was only in 1978 that they were allowed to publish the work and it was in the year 2000 the WHO recommended her treatment. She was ultimately the first female Chinese to receive the Nobel Prize. Hard work pays off.

Whereas Warren Buffett’s story is all about luck, Tu’s story shows the power of hard work. There is no denying in the power of luck but most of us believe that hard work make the difference.

When you are climbing Everest, your hard work will take you to the top unless weather and health plays foul play.

ABSULUTE SUCCESS AND RELATIVE SUCCESS

In one way we can say that absolute luck matters in the absolute sense and hard work matters in relative sense.

Absolute success makes one the best in the world in a particular domain. It is a combination of many things like right genes, right contacts, right timing, right opportunity, right hard work etc. All these things have to fall in place perfectly to make someone the best in the world. While many try for it in each domain but only one reaches there.

Relative success is what one achieves compared to many similar like him. There are millions in the world with the same education, talent and perusing the same field but here level of success is different. Here hard work comes into play.

When one moves towards absolute success then the proportion of luck in that success increases. The absolute success is global in nature. Relative success is more localized. Consider your school friends, many of you may be studied in the same school, same college, and same stream but after a decade some are more successful than the other. Here hard work becomes decisive.

Both the stories give their own insight about success, it depends on you which one you believe more, or a combination of both.

We can look at it in another way. Suppose in the graph of success, X axis measures time and Y axis measures success. Those who are born in difficult circumstances will start at a lower position than those who are born lucky. Your degree of success right now doesn’t matter. What matters is your choice of habits, whether it is putting you in the path of success. You trajectory in the graph is important. If you are in the right trajectory then with time and effort you may make up the lost ground due to bad luck. One study found that is wealth was a measurement of success then more than 50 percent had moderate talent but very good luck.

In any case both these factors cannot work in isolation. Both have their dominant role in success. Bill Gates was lucky to start his business in the right point of time, but the immense hard work he put before that cannot be ignored also.

Fortunately or unfortunately there is no formula to be lucky. It can only be said that the more you try the more are your chances of stumbling into the door of luck.