I’m currently reading “Fooled by randomness: The hidden chance of luck in markets and life” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m still on the 10th page, where anecdotes about stupid and successful people are rolling. Preliminary verdict, entertaining. But this post is not about the book.
How much does luck have to do with success? I really don’t know how much, but I hope it’s not a lot. Firstly success to me is best defined by how satisfied I’ll be. Ultimate success is enough freedom to do anything I would want to. I’m not sure if you understand, but I don’t expect you to. To each his own definition. Reasoning it will be useless, I think we all know enough about success, not to try reasoning or worse quantifying it.
Lets talk about people generally accepted to be successful, which could probably be quantified by number of people envious of them. Think about CEOs of Investment Banks, astronauts, rock stars, actors, models, other people who have jobs millions would kill for. Are they up there, because they have higher IQs, GPAs, more talent, more beautiful? Is it a weighted sum of the above parameters? With enough statistics can you create a formula? Can you predict it most of the times? I think I’m asking a lot of questions whose true answers will lie somewhere in a long heated debate.
I’ve read books written by successful people, about successful people, not very successful people motivating you to be successful (Robin Sharma, Shiv Khera). There’s very little pattern. One thing I notice is, they all seem to be go-getters, jumping on and then latching on to every opportunity, active and intelligent. The book ‘Emotional Intelligence’ by Daniel Goleman, created a revolution by suggesting and proving IQ is not a very major factor in success, but emotional intelligence is. It says understanding emotions is a more important factor. It could be, understanding emotions and coming to terms with them is the first step to understanding ourselves. When I first read it, I suddenly understood everybody else better. It’s a must read. You really need to understand people in order to manipulate(is there a less harsher word?) them into getting that raise, the deal fixed or a job.
Coming back to luck, Bill Gates got lucky, when IBM bought the OS they never had, while Steve Jobs arrogantly missed an IBM meeting scheduled a few days before. Some entrepreneur ran into a VC in an elevator and got his funding, Gisele Bundchen got spotted in a McDonald’s, Akshay Kumar was waiting tables when he got spotted, Edmund Hillary was ‘lucky’ with good weather, closer home my Dad couldn’t sell a stock because telephone network went down. If you think about it luck is a bigger part of our lives than we realize it or would accept it. That’s alright, rationality and reason makes us feel more in control. But maybe it’s necessary to accept luck and plan for it. Cashing on every opportunity wouldn’t hurt nor would missing one 
.
Thinking about success in startups, its an even more inexact science. We see many eamples of good products losing it, bad products doing exceptionally well. While buying it we ask, it’s so useless, what were they thinking? YouNoodle claims to predict startup success. Most probably it’s run by crazed junkies. But they refuse to run the algorithm on themselves. If it says they’ll fail, it’ll be accurate, if in spite of their algo’s result they succeed. I rest my case. I seriously doubt even VCs have a chance in hell predicting success. I’m convinced they are just as clueless as us after hearing tales of how entrant plans in Conquest highly rated by one VC is not impressive to another. It’s saying a lot because Conquest plans are judged by VCs from DFJ, Sequoia, Foundation Capital, ICICI Ventures, etc.
If you’ve ever seen Survivor or Roadies (ha ha!) you’ll have an understanding how random success can be. You can never ever predict who’s going to win ultimately or even get voted out. Well one reason could be the lack of enough information because not the whole footage is shown to the audience. But even if you consider that, it’s never the most talented, the most cunning or the most attractive person who wins. It’s not even the most likable person. It’s always some random guy who’ll surprise most people.
To finish this long post, a quote from the ‘Fooled by randomness’.
“If you are so rich? How come you are so stupid?”
Please please disagree with me or agree with me by commenting. I’m getting too many spam comments and moderating them makes my belly go cold.
ps: I’m now also writing for Webyantra which profiles Indian Web startups. I haven’t published my first post yet, but it’s in the pipeline.
) and walked back empty handed, again. In my defence, the stage was undoubtedly, the most competitive possible. It was the second time on stage for three of us (Arvind, King and I) and third time for Pallavi. Rachit and Thiru (finally!) were the ‘newbies’. The quiz was really Arvind, Thiru and Pallavi’s style, which meant tons of trivia. There were hardly any workoutable ones 
