Buffett vs. Carnegie and Rand: The Role Of Luck In Success
WARREN BUFFETT: I’m not sure whether it’s intellectual or emotional, but when I was born in 1930 the odds were 40-to-1 against me being born in the United States as opposed to someplace else. I was a male. The odds were even money on that. So now I’m down to 80-to-1. You don’t want to bet on 80-to-1 shots normally, but I got lucky. As Bill says, if I’d been born a few thousand years ago I’d have been some animal’s lunch, because I’d have gone around saying, ‘Well, I allocate capital,’ you know, and the animal would say, ‘They’re the kind that tastes the best.’ I can’t run fast. And I can’t climb trees. And so here I am, by pure, pure luck, born at the right time, the right gender as it turned out, compared to my sisters who were just as smart or smarter than I am, in the right place and in a system where allocating capital pays off like crazy.
NAPOLEON HILL: Well, Mr. Carnegie, is it not true that success is often the result of “luck”?
ANDREW CARNEGIE: If you analyze my definition of success you will see that there is no element of luck about it. A man may, and sometimes men do, fall into opportunities through mere chance, or luck; but they have a queer way of falling out of these opportunities the first time opposition overtakes them.
A man may come in possession of opportunity by pull, but he can stay in possession of it only by push, and that calls for Definitiveness of Purpose!
And here is Ayn Rand, from her essay “An Untitled Letter” in Philosophy: Who Needs It:
I submit that any man who ascribes success to “luck” has never achieved anything and has no inkling of the relentless effort which achievement requires. I submit that a successful man who ascribes his own (legitimate) success in part to luck is either a modest, concrete-bound represser who does not understand the issue—or an appeaser who tries to mollify the resentment of envious mediocrities.
11 Comments to “Buffett vs. Carnegie and Rand: The Role Of Luck In Success”
I think Warren Buffett should try his hand at writing a motivational self-help book. He could give us all sorts of tips on how we can be born at the right time, and what magical incantations we can use to become a billionaire like him (“I allocate capital” didn’t seem to work for me).
Meanwhile, Gates could try his hand at writing a history book. Tell us more about how “only a few thousand years ago” we were climbing trees to escape predators. Ooga booga.
Warren Buffett strikes me as senile. He’s spent a lifetime accruing some unspendable amount of money only now to have some hallelujah awakening that life is deeper than that. He’ll try to cap what others can earn only after having earned so much himself.
I subscribe to the notion that luck is simply the intersection of opportunity and preparation. If the opportunity appears and you are not prepared, you will not see the opportunity. On the other hand, if you are prepared and the opportunity does not appear, you will most often make it anyway. It will simply be by a different path. Others, who are not so well prepared and who don’t want to do the work required, will say you were lucky rather than blame themselves for not making it.
In a very real sense, we make our own luck and luck doesn’t have anything to do with it. It takes hard mental and physical work, discipline, focus, and adherence to reason, reality, and logic. If you don’t do the work and have those qualities, being lucky won’t help.
Notice no one is saying Buffet vs. Carnegie and Buckley?
I love Napoleon Hill!!!! I have always noticed a huge connection between him and Ayn Rand. It is interesting to try to find differences between his philosophy and Ayn Rand’s. I find many more similarities than differences. I emailed Dr. Peikoff asking him what Ayn Rand thought of him, but he said that she had never mentioned it.
If luck doesn’t play any role then anybody who put’s relentless efforts should become successfull which doesn’t always happen.A person who worked his ass off for years could just get run over by a truck just a day before his promotion. It’s kind of a dead beat attitude , but it’s the truth.
Exactly. They still have to be in the right place at the right time with the right tallant. Many times things people excel at aren’t the things that will make you financially successful, and sometimes ridiculous things will make you a fortune, like playing sports for an audience.
False. It’s not that the efforts are relentless, but that they are effective. Now, to be effective is probably also not trivial, so a person generally needs to be smart and relentless.
And yes, a person who worked his ass off for years could get hit by a truck the day before his big promotion. He could also win the lottery the day before his promotion. Since you can’t know in advance what will happen (if anything), you just have to plow ahead doing the best you can. There are no guarantees in life.
Submission accepted, subject to a major qualification: “in a free society.”
Certain other qualifications, minor to the issue of this post, also apply. It is true that to elevate luck to an essential causal role in success is to deny free will. Similarly, to ascribe luck metaphysical efficacy is to deny the law of identity. Yet, on the other hand, to assert that success must always follow every instance of long, hard and honest efforts, is rewriting reality–man is not infallible.
To try to skirt around the issue by pointing out the “other” benefits of hard honest efforts is to insult, in a sense, the honest query. It’s easier to point out that you can’t (even “in theory”) expect always to succeed once you put in the best possible effort.
BTW, it also sounds more honest this way to a typical questioner, than his receiving any band-aid of the “other” benefits of efforts. People typically do know, on their own, what those side-benefits of those honest effort are. (Their such knowledge is not so much in doubt as is their ability to hold on to it, on their own). The reason they raise issues about luck, their purpose behind the query, isn’t whether any “other” benefits are available to an honest and hard working man, or not. Their starting question often simply pertains to the issue of the existence of luck, rather than of side benefits of hard-work. They want to ask: does something like luck at all exists, or not; what Ayn Rand had say about it. Thus, to offer the “band-aids” on that question is to skirt the issue, and may amount to being too tactful to be honest.
An aside: The last obervation (viz. that man is not infallible, in relation to reality) is enormously important. It holds even if a premise outside of Ayn Rand’s direct writings is brought into the picture, viz., the law of “karma.” However, to ponder more on this line, would be out of the bounds for this forum. So, for the present reply, it should suffice to note that the primacy of existence and the law of identity, including its application to consciousness, continue to hold–and, crucially, serve to circumscribe–the law of “karma;” even the ancient Vedic version of it which takes “karma” to span across lifetimes. Enough said.
Carnegie’s reply was good, too. But my point is this: both his reply, and Ayn Rand’s observation, apply on in the statistical sense. There is a high probability that you will succeed (in a free society) with your honest, good efforts. But neither of them even address the issue in the basic, existence sense: does luck at all exist or not? I say, it is more honest to say: yes, it does in the sense man is not infallible, but, in the statistical sense, it doesn’t matter.
And, since I wrote this long a reply, I know what’s coming. . . Don’t ask me for a definition of luck
Ajit
[E&OE]
It doesn’t really make sense what he’s saying: 40:1 being born in US, 2:1 being male etc. It sounds like he thinks he is a soul in heaven, throwing a dice to decide what body he gets, but no, he could never have been anything else, it was just cause and effect.
+1