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Both hard work and luck are necessary for greatness and neither is sufficient on its own. However, they are tangled up together, feeding into each other:
- If you work hard, you’re more likely to get lucky – you create more lucky opportunities (“luck surface area”) and are better prepared to capitalize on them.
- If you capitalize on a lucky opportunity and feel like you’re succeeding and your hard work is making a difference, you get excited and motivated to lean into it further and continue working even harder. (“Nothing succeeds like success.”)
Greatness emerges from a virtuous cycle of hard work and luck compounding on each other.
That said, while many forms of luck can be shaped by hard work, there are other forms of luck that cannot, such as some biological advantages. So, while it’s necessary to work hard to capitalize on the compounding nature of hard work and luck, it’s also necessary to choose a direction that enables you to capitalize on any lucky innate edge you may have.
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