Luck is more important to success

“If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get that on your own,” President Obama declared years ago at a campaign rally. “If you’re successful, somebody along the line gave you some help.” In America, the belief that hard work and a touch of grit is all one needs to succeed. Talent and drive can take you a long way, but it’s often not enough. Luck is as important.

• Most Americans underestimate the role of luck in economic success.
• The current American tendency is to overlook the role of luck as a cultural bias and Americans are less likely than Europeans to favor high taxes on the rich and generous benefits for the poor.
• Conservatives have a narrative about success, which prioritizes hard work and skill. Liberals have an alternative narrative about success, which prioritizes structural constraints and privilege. Neither one is entirely right, but it does seem that liberals are closer to the truth.
• People who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But it is also true that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. 
• Chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.
• The rich underestimate the importance of luck in success and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
• In this world dominated by winner-take-all markets, chance opportunities and trivial initial advantages often translate into much larger ones and enormous income differences over time. 
• Luck is as important as hard work in becoming successful.
• Fortune favors the fortunate. And not acknowledging that can have unlucky consequences.
• People who succeed on a grand scale tend to believe they did it all by themselves. They think that whatever dollars came their way are theirs to keep. If the government tries to tax it, they regard it as theft. 
• Believing that all the good fortune that came your way was earned in the traditional sense is a very difficult claim to sustain once you look at how the competitions unfold and the role chance events play in all our lives.
• Ethically speaking, we have no control over the most important determinants of our lives. Even if you think you succeeded purely on the basis of talent and effort, where do you think you got your talent? Where do you think that inclination to work hard comes from? These are things determined by genes and upbringing and it's quite ludicrous to claim moral credit for them.
• Privilege has a way of blinding the privileged. People born into good fortune can’t appreciate how much of their success stems from the care and attention and resources they received at every stage of their development.
• You're probably not going to succeed if you don't get really good at work and effort. You shouldn't expect and wait with hope that lightning strikes. Tell people to try to deserve whatever it is that they want. That doesn't mean you'll get it, but you're certainly not going to get it if you don't deserve it.
• We really need to make the investments where the environment is conducive for talented and hard-working chances of succeeding. In America it was always true that if you work hard and are good, you may not be a spectacular success, but you'd most likely prosper to a reasonable degree.
• Rich people could pay more taxes and scarcely feel it, but nobody thinks about it that way.

Markets are not perfectly meritocratic. They're more meritocratic now than ever before in the past. Privilege always matters. Most of the people who emerge as big winners today do tend to be talented and hard-working, so there's at least a semblance of meritocracy. What's also true is that being hard-working and talented are by no means sufficient to get you into the winner's circle. Luck matters a great deal.

Luck is far more important to success in this life than we imagine.
 Things we're not entitled to claim moral credit for are the driving forces 
behind success ... Robert H. Frank

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