The Success Equation. Michael J. Mauboussin

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СКАЧАТЬ you fail the class. So a B is good enough for Charlie. Think of his strategy as employing true skill, because luck plays no role in how Charlie will perform on the test. He either knows the answer or he doesn't. And he can predict the consequences of his efforts.

      However, instead of asking the class for all hundred facts, the devious teacher writes her test by randomly selecting twenty pieces of information out of the one hundred. Charlie's entire score is now dependent on which of those twenty facts match the ones he memorized. If you look at his predicament statistically, he has about a two-thirds chance of scoring somewhere between 75 and 85 percent. A grade of 85 would be okay, a high B. But a grade of 75 would not. Making matters worse, he has about a 30 percent chance of scoring either 90 or higher or 70 or lower. Suddenly, his perfect knowledge of those eighty facts can't shield him from luck.

      His performance on the test is beginning to seem like a crap shoot. He'd be fine with scoring 90, of course, but he'll be doomed if he scores 70 or lower. In theory, Charlie could score zero if the teacher, just by chance, chose only the twenty facts that he failed to memorize. He could also score 100 if she chose none of those twenty. But the probabilities of those two extremes are vanishingly small. So Charlie's skill can easily be measured as 80 percent of perfect under one set of conditions. But under a second set of conditions, his score can vary wildly. Moreover, under the second set of conditions, measuring his skill in any meaningful way based solely on his score is much more difficult.

      The second set of conditions introduces the element of luck into the process. And it satisfies the definition as I've stated it so far.

       The grade affects the student.

       It is either good or bad (he scores either above or below 80).

       It is reasonable to assume that another result was possible if only the teacher had selected different questions.

      Standardized tests scores, including the SAT Reasoning Test used for admission to college in the United States, reflect the influence of luck in the same way. That's why the admissions officers who assess those tests recognize that the scores are an imprecise measure of true skill.⁸ Introducing a little bit of luck into a system can make the level of genuine skill very difficult to measure.

      In this case, we assumed that Charlie's skill was fixed and not subject to variation. In fact, his declarative memory was very accurate. He knew eighty facts. If he was asked for them, he could regurgitate them reliably. We introduced the element of luck by varying the number of questions the teacher chose.

      Skill was fairly well fixed in Charlie's example, but luck can also arise through the normal variation in other kinds of skill. Consider a basketball player who makes 70 percent of her free-throw shots over a long season. You wouldn't expect that player to make seven out of every ten shots she takes. Rather, some nights she might make 90 percent of her free throws and other nights only 50 percent. Even if she trains constantly at improving her free throws, she'll experience the variation that arises from the workings of the neuromuscular system, which relies on a completely different system of memory from the one that allows us to recall facts. An athlete can reduce that variation in performance through practice, but removing it altogether is virtually impossible.⁹

      Randomness and luck are related, but there is a useful distinction between the two. You can think of randomness as operating at the level of a system and luck operating at the level of the individual. Say you ask a hundred people to call five consecutive tosses of a fair coin. The order of how heads and tails fall will be random, and we can estimate that a handful of people will call all five tosses correctly. But if you are one among the hundred and happen to get them all right, you are lucky.

      My definition suggests that it is useful to develop an attitude of equanimity toward luck. The consequences of our efforts, both good and bad, reflect an element within our control—skill—and an element outside of our control—luck. In this sense, luck is a residual: it's what is left over after you've subtracted skill from an outcome. Realizing good or bad luck says nothing about you as a person. If you've benefited from good luck, be happy about it and prepare for the day when your luck runs out. And don't feel affronted when you suffer from bad luck. Provided that you have approached the activity in the correct fashion, you want to shrug off the poor results and go about your business in the same fashion in the future.

      Most people have a general sense that luck evens out over time. That may be true in the grand scheme of things. But the observation doesn't hold for any individual, and the timing of luck can have a large cumulative effect. One well-documented example is the timing of graduation from college. Students who graduate at times of relative prosperity have an easier time getting jobs and enjoy higher pay than students who graduate during a recession or depression. Lisa Kahn, an economist at the Yale School of Management, studied this effect. For white male students at the time of graduation, the unemployment rate can be used to predict a loss of earnings. For each percentage point of unemployment, the graduate will earn 6 to 7 percent less. Fifteen years later, he'll still be below par.¹⁰ The difference in what people earn is strongly influenced by whether or not the economy is weak or strong when they graduate from college. In other words, it's a matter of luck.

      Making Your Own Luck

      Since luck is intimately intertwined in all of our lives, it comes as no surprise that there are plenty of aphorisms that address luck:

       “You make your own luck.”

       “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

       “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”11

      Preparation and hard work are essential elements of skill. They often lead to good outcomes. But the aphorisms don't really address what's happening. If you prepare and work hard, you are successful not because your luck improves. Luck doesn't change at all. Only your skill improves. And you can work hard and prepare and build the best American diner on Route 66 just when the interstate highway bypasses your town and puts you out of a job.

      There's another popular argument that says you can't get lucky unless you get in luck's way. For example, you can't win the lottery unless you play. On one level, of course, this is true. But it glosses over two important points. Luck can be good or bad. While winning the lottery does seem like good luck, it's hard to say that losing the lottery is bad luck. Losing the lottery is expected. Lotteries are designed to take in more money than they dole out, so they are a loser's game in the aggregate. The main issue is that putting yourself in a position to enjoy good luck also puts you in a position to lose.

      The other point is that the very effort that leads to luck is a skill. Say that you need to complete ten interviews with prospective employers to receive one job offer. Individuals who seek only five interviews may not get an offer, but those who go through all ten interviews will have an offer in hand by the end of the process. Getting an offer isn't luck, it's a matter of effort. Patience, persistence, and resilience are all elements of skill.

      The best-known advocate for the idea that you can create your own luck is Richard Wiseman, a professor at the University of Hertfordshire who holds Britain's Chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology. Wiseman's investigations are offbeat and fun. For example, he conducted a “scientific search” for the world's funniest joke. (The winner: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, “My friend is dead! What can I do?” The operator says, “Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.” There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says, “OK, now what?”) He also argues that he has found “a scientifically proven way to understand, control, and increase your СКАЧАТЬ