ABSOLUTE SUCESS IS LUCK. RELATIVE SUCESS IS HARDWORK.

Absolute success is luck. Relative success is hard work.

    In 1997, Warren Buffett, the famous investor and billionaire, proposed a thought experiment.

"Imagine it's 24 hours before you're born, and a genie appears," he said."

    “The genius says that you can determine the rules of the society you are about to enter and you can design whatever you want. You have the opportunity to design the social rules, the economic rules, the government rules. And those rules will prevail for life and their children and their grandchildren. "But there is a catch," he said.

    “You don't know whether you'll be born rich or poor, male or female, sick or capable, in the United States or Afghanistan. All you know is that you can get a ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion balls in it. And that's you «.

     “In other word,” Buffett continues, “you will be a part of what I call the Ovarian Lottery.” And that is the most important thing that is going to happen to you in your life. It will determine much more than the school you go to, how much you work, all kinds of things.

     Buffett has long been an advocate for the role of luck in success. "By sheer luck, [my business partner] Charlie and I were born in the United States, and we will be eternally grateful," he wrote in his 2014 annual letter the amazing benefits this birth accident has brought us."

     When explained in this manner, it appears difficult to deny the significance of chance, luck, and good fortune in life. And, in fact, these factors play a fundamental role. But let's consider a second story.

The history of project 523

     In 1969, during the fourteenth year of the Vietnam War, a Chinese scientist named Tu Youyou was appointed director of a secret research group in Beijing. The unit was only known by the code name Project 523.

     China was an ally of Vietnam and Project 523 had been created to develop antimalarial drugs that could be administered to soldiers. The disease had become a big problem. Like many Vietnamese soldiers they died of malaria in the jungle as they died in battle.

     Tu began his work looking for clues anywhere he could find them. I read manuals on old home remedies. He searched ancient texts that were hundreds or thousands of years old. He traveled to remote regions in search of plants that might contain a cure.

     After months of work, his team had collected more than 600 plants and created a list of almost 2,000 possible remedies. Tu narrowed the list of potential drugs to 380 and tested each one on laboratory mice one by one.

     "This was the most difficult stage of the project," he explains. "It was a very laborious and tedious job, particularly when faced with one failure after another."

     Hundreds of tests were carried out. Most of them yielded nothing. But one test, an extract from the sweet wormwood plant known as qinghao, looked promising. Tu was ecstatic about the prospect, but despite her best efforts, the plant only produced a potent antimalarial drug on rare occasions. It wouldn't always work.

      His team had already been working for two years, but decided they had to start over from the beginning. Tu went through each test and reread each book, looking for a clue about something that was lost. Then, magically, he stumbled upon a single sentence from the Emergency Prescribing Manual , an ancient Chinese text written more than 1,500 years ago.

     The problem was the heat. If the temperature were too high during the extraction process, the active ingredient in the sweet wormwood plant would be destroyed. You redesigned the experiment using solvents with a lower boiling point, and finally had an antimalarial drug that worked 100 percent of the time.

It was a breakthrough, but the real work was just beginning.

The power of hard work

     With a tested drug in hand, it was time for human trials. Unfortunately, at that time there were no centers in China that were conducting trials of new drugs. And due to the secrecy of the project, going to a facility outside the country was out of the question.

They had reached a dead end.

     That's when Tu volunteered to be the first human subject to test the drug. In one of the boldest moves in the history of medical science, she and two other members of Project 523 became infected with malaria and received the first doses of their new drug.

It worked.

     However, despite his discovery of a revolutionary drug and his willingness to risk his own life, Tu was unable to share his findings with the outside world. The Chinese government had strict rules prohibiting the publication of any scientific data.

     She was unfazed. Tu continued his research, eventually learning the chemical structure of the drug, a compound officially known as artemisinin, and also developing a second antimalarial drug.

     It wasn't until 1978, almost a decade after she began and three years after the Vietnam War ended, that Tu's work was finally released to the outside world. It would have to wait until 2000 before the World Health Organization recommended the treatment as a defense against malaria.

     Currently, artemisinin treatment has been administered more than 1 billion times to malaria patients. Millions of lives are thought to have been saved as a result of it.. Tu Youyou is the first Chinese citizen to receive a Nobel Prize and the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Prize for her significant contributions to medical science.

Luck or hard work?

     Your Youyou was not terribly lucky. What I like most about her is that she does not have a graduate degree, has no research experience abroad, and is not a member of any of the Chinese national academies, earning her the moniker "The Professor of Three Nos."

     But damn, she was a hard worker. Persistent. Diligent. Driven. For decades he did not give up and, as a result, helped save millions of lives. Her story is a shining example of how important hard work can be to your success.

     The idea that the Ovarian Lottery determined the majority of your success in life seemed reasonable just a moment ago, but the idea that hard work matters feels just as reasonable'. When you work hard, you usually get better results than when you work less hard. While we can't deny the importance of luck, everyone seems to believe that hard work makes a difference.

     So what is it? What determines success? Hard work or good luck? Effort or randomness? I think we all understand that both factors play a role, but I'd like to give you a better answer than "It depends."

Here are two ways I see the problem.

Absolute success versus relative success

     One way to answer this question is that luck is more important in absolute terms, while hard work is more important in relative terms.

    The absolute view considers your level of success compared to others. What makes someone the best in the world at something? When viewed at this level, success is almost always attributed to luck. Even if you make a good initial decision, like Bill Gates's decision to start a computer company, you cannot understand all the factors that cause world-class results.

    As a general rule of thumb, the greater the success, the more extreme and unlikely the circumstances that caused it. It's frequently a combination of the right genes, the right connections, the right time, and a thousand other factors that no one can predict.

    As a general rule of thumb, the greater the success, the more extreme and unlikely the circumstances that caused it.

   Then there is the relative view, which considers your level of success compared to others similar to you. What about the millions of people who had comparable levels of education, grew up in comparable neighborhoods, or were born with comparable levels of genetic talent? These people are not achieving the same results. The more local the comparison becomes, the more success the hard work determines. When comparing yourself to others who have had similar amounts of luck, the difference is in your habits and choices.

Absolute success is luck. Relative success are choices and habits.

      There is an important idea that follows naturally from this definition: as the results become more extreme, the role of luck increases. That is, as you achieve greater absolute success, we can attribute a greater proportion of your success to chance.

     “Mild success can be explained by skills and work,” Nassim Taleb wrote in Fooled by Randomness. The great success can be attributed to the 'variation.

Both stories are true

    Sometimes people have trouble keeping both skills at the same time. There is a tendency to discuss the results in a global or local sense.

    The absolute view is more global. What explains the difference between a wealthy person born in the United States and someone born into extreme poverty and living on less than $ 1 a day? When you talk about success from this angle, people say things like, “How can you not see your privilege? Don't you realize how much they have given you?

    The relative view is more local. What accounts for the disparity in outcomes between you and everyone else who went to the same school, grew up in the same neighborhood, or worked for the same company?

    When looking at success from a local point of view, people say things like, “Are you kidding me? Do you know that I worked hard? Do you understand the choices and sacrifices I made that others did not understand? Dismissing my success as a result of luck diminishes the effort I put in. If my success is due to luck or my environment, how come my neighbors or classmates or coworkers did not achieve the same? «

Both stories are true. It simply depends on the lens through which you are viewing life.

The slope of success

     There is another way to examine the balance between luck and hard work, which is to consider how success is influenced over time.

     Imagine that you can map success on a graph. Success is measured on the Y-axis. Time is measured on the X-axis. And when he is born, the ball he draws from Buffett's Ovarian Lottery determines the y-intercept. Those who are born lucky start higher on the chart. Those born into more difficult circumstances start out lower.

Here's the key: You can only control the slope of your success, not your starting position.

     “It makes no difference whether you are successful or unsuccessful right now. What matters is whether your habits are setting you up for success. You should be much more concerned with your current track record than with your current performance. ''

You can only control the slope of your success, not your starting position.

     You may even be able to make up ground lost due to bad luck if you have a positive incline and enough time and effort. I thought this quote summed it up well: "The more time that passes from the start of a race, the less advantage others have."

     Of course, this is not always the case. A serious illness can wreak havoc on your health. A failing pension fund can devastate your retirement savings. Similarly, luck can provide a long-term advantage (or disadvantage). According to one study, if success is measured by wealth, the most successful people are almost certainly those with average talent and exceptional luck.

     In any case, the two cannot be separated. Matter and hard work frequently play a larger role as time passes.

     This is true not only for dealing with bad luck, but also for capitalizing on good luck. Bill Gates was extremely fortunate to have founded Microsoft at the right time in history, but the opportunity would have been squandered without decades of hard work. All advantages deteriorate over time. To some extent, good fortune necessitates hard work if you are to be successful.

How to put luck on your side

     Luck, by definition, is beyond your control. Still, understanding its role and how it works can help you prepare for when fortune (or misfortune) comes your way.

     Richard Hamming, a mathematician and computer engineer, summed up what it takes to do great work in his fantastic talk, You and Your Research, by saying, "There is actually an element of luck, and no, there isn't." The prepared mind, sooner or later, discovers and acts on something significant. So, yes, it is a stroke of luck. What you do is fortunate, but what you do is not.

     By taking measurements, you can increase your surface area for good luck. The picker who explores extensively will encounter a lot of useless terrain, but he or she is also more likely to come across a plentiful patch of berries than the person who stays at home. Similarly, the person who works hard, seeks opportunities, and tries harder is more likely to strike lucky than the person who waits. The famous golfer and nine-time major champion Gary Player once said, "The more I practice, the luckier I get."

    Finally, we have no control over our luck, good or bad, but we do have control over our effort and preparation. Luck smiles on all of us from time to time. And when that happens, the best way to honor your good fortune is to work hard and make the most of it.