Pages

June 6, 2012

Are you one of the lucky few?

Love this speech by Michael Lewis at Princeton's graduation. Luck as an explanatory factor for success is hard to reconcile within yourself. To paraphrase Lewis, you feel you deserve success because of x, y or z. "But you'll be happier, and the world will be better off, if you at least pretend that you don't."
"People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don't want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either."...
"If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don't be deceived by life's outcomes. Life's outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky. 
I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget."...
"But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything."