Luck is the variable everyone leaves out of the model

When we talk about successful people, we almost always start at the end. We look at the fame, the trophy, the valuation, the finished version of the person, and we treat that last frame as if it were the whole film. Then we ask them how they did it, and they tell us. The hard work. The dedication. The years when nothing was working and they kept going anyway. The people who stayed. And the admirers ask for more, and try to copy the routine, and discover soon enough that it was never a matter of simply wanting it badly enough, which of course only makes the person on the pedestal look taller.

Ronaldo said it better than I can: "everyone wants to be Cristiano, but if I give you the map…"

He's right, and the path less travelled deserves every bit of the praise it gets. But there is still one term missing from the equation, and we almost never say it out loud: luck.

Luck can be 1% of it. It can be 0.1%, or 50%, or any number you like. The number moves with the story. What doesn't move is that you never get to 100% without it.

Now, I'm aware I'm trying to sound, as people my age would say, intellectual af here. But I think in pictures more than paragraphs, so here is the diagram.

Read it left to right. The star on the right is the goal. The wavy line standing just in front of it is luck, which everyone can see, nobody built, and nobody gets past without. The dotted line along the bottom is the baseline: the talent and the work and the basic competence you need before anybody looks at you twice.

A, B, C and D are people. Height in this picture means exactly one thing, whether you clear the baseline, and all four clear it by the same margin. Same talent, same hours, same willingness to give things up. The only difference between them is sideways: how close to the path they happened to be born. A is not nearest because A is better. A is nearest because that is where A started, and not one of the four picked their spot or can move it.

That's the model. Everybody in the frame is good enough. The distance is the part that never makes it into the memoir.

And if you're anything like I was when I first sketched this, you're already objecting. Fine, but D can just work harder. D can put in more hours than A, want it more than A, close the distance on their own. The path is right there in the same picture, and nobody is standing in D's way.

That is the most reasonable thing anybody says about any of this, and it deserves a real answer instead of a shrug. So let's add some context, and one more dotted line.

Some context, and one more dotted line

Say the goal is Formula 1 driver.

There are twenty seats on the grid. Twenty, on a planet of eight billion people, which means the sport can afford to be completely unreasonable about who it even looks at. So the requirement is not just reflexes, spatial awareness, neck strength, the ability to hold total concentration at 300 km/h for ninety minutes. It is also karting from roughly the age of five, which costs a family six figures before the kid is old enough to have an opinion about it. In a country with a track. Within driving distance of a parent whose weekends are free. In a region a junior programme actually scouts.

None of that is talent. All of it is position. And here is what it does to the picture:

The baseline didn't move. All four are still above it, still just as fast. What moved is the cut, which is how close you have to have started for the path to be able to reach you at all. For a star this rare the cut sits absurdly far along, and the only one of the four born inside it is A.

So B is exactly as quick and grew up four hours from the nearest circuit. C is exactly as quick and there is no circuit in the country. D is exactly as quick, has never sat in a kart, never will, and will go through an entire life without ever finding this out about themselves.

D is not less deserving than A. D is further left. That is the whole difference, and it was settled before any of them could walk.

And A is not lying, either. A did get up at five. A did give up a normal childhood, did the reps, took the risk, wanted it more than the people around them. Every single thing on A's map is true. The map just doesn't show where A was standing when the race started.

So what do you do with that

There are two easy conclusions here and both are wrong.

The first is it's all luck, so why bother. No. The baseline is real, and being under it means the path can run straight past you and nothing happens at all. Luck is not a prize, it's an opportunity, and an opportunity handed to somebody who can't convert it is just a story about a near miss. The break I got in my twenties would have been worthless to me at nineteen.

The second is I made it, therefore I was the most deserving one in the picture. That's reading the map without looking at the starting position.

What effort actually buys you is an arrow.

It's the same arrow for everybody, and it's the only thing in any of these pictures that you own. It's also genuinely powerful. It moves you right. It puts you where luck tends to pass: sending the email, shipping the side project, staying in the room, being the person somebody thinks of when a seat opens up unexpectedly. Nearly everything people call "making your own luck" is just increasing the number of chances luck gets to hit something.

But look at what the same arrow does. It carries A well inside the cut, barely drags B over it, and leaves C and D roughly where they started. Same effort, four different endings, and only one of those four ever gets asked to explain their process.

Which is the answer to the objection, and it is not a satisfying one. Of course D can work harder. D can draw the longest arrow on the page and put A to shame doing it. It still doesn't close a gap that was never the size of an arrow.

And look at where A's arrow lands: on the path. That's the whole trick, and it isn't a trick at all. The arrow didn't get longer for A, the gap was shorter. Effort never manufactures luck, it only has to be long enough to reach it, and how long it needs to be was settled before anybody picked up a pen.

Which brings me to the second arrow in that picture, the dotted one. Somebody can move you. A teacher who leaves the lab unlocked, a manager who puts your name in a room you weren't in, an admissions officer who takes a chance on an application from a country they've never been to. It's the longest arrow on the page and it costs the person drawing it almost nothing.

That's the real reason to say any of this out loud. The model you carry changes how you treat people. If you think outcomes are purely earned, then everybody standing to the left of you failed a test, and you'll be quietly contemptuous of them and merciless with yourself the first time something doesn't work. If you know the distance is in there, you get some grace for the people who did everything right and are still waiting, and you notice that you're now in a position to be somebody else's dotted arrow.

My two cents, then

I was born in Mauritius, on an island most people can't place on a map, to a family that could pay the school fees without a conversation about it. That's the first stretch of distance I never had to cover, and it's the longest one on the list. I did nothing to earn it. I was taught in English, which happens to be the language of the industry I would end up working in, an accident of colonial history that I get to file under "advantage." Somebody in an admissions office read an application from a kid with no test-prep industry behind him and said yes. I have never met them and never will.

Then Boston. Then Seattle, and a job writing software.

The work was real. The nights were mine, the failures were mine, the times I nearly quit were extremely mine. I'm not handing any of that back. But I can hold both things at once: I drew the arrow, and I did not choose where on the page they handed it to me.

So, that's my two cents on luck. If you got here, some of it was you and some of it was the distance, and the honest version of your story has both in it.

I don't think the star gets any bigger. There are twenty seats and there will always be twenty seats, and no amount of good intentions turns that into forty. But the distance is not a law of physics. It's the sum of a lot of small decisions taken by people who were already close to the path: who hears that the job is open, who gets the introduction, who gets the benefit of the doubt in the room, whose kid gets driven to the track on a Saturday morning.

So the picture I want isn't the one where everybody reaches the star. Ideally, if enough of those small decisions go the other way, something like this can happen.

Same four people. Same baseline, same talent, same single star, and still only one of them is getting there. The only thing that changed is that nobody is standing further from the path because of where they happened to be born.

And drawing one of those dotted arrows is not a career or a cause. It's an introduction. A reply to the email. Somebody's name said out loud in a room they weren't in. You can do that this week, and the person on the other end will probably never know it was you.

The end goal may be unrealistic, but little changes can go a long way :)