The Role of Luck in Life Success
I&#x27;ve had a saying for a long time: it&#x27;s better to be lucky than good.  It doesn&#x27;t matter how good you are if you&#x27;re unlucky, and it doesn&#x27;t matter how bad you are if you&#x27;re lucky.<p>There are lots of complicated statements around luck and success.  For instance, how lucky was Zuckerberg to have been at Harvard for college when he was?  He obviously saw an opportunity and turned it into Facebook, but do you think it&#x27;s even conceivable he could have done that had he not happened to have been a student at Harvard?  What if the Winklevoss twins had never approached him in the first place?  What if he never met Sean Parker?  There were a string of things that had to line up for the story to evolve the way it did, and none of them were in Zuckerberg&#x27;s control.<p>It&#x27;s very easy to come up with examples of people just being unlucky.  You could be born with a serious illness.  Your child could die during birth.  It&#x27;s easy to think of situations that are just awful and there is nothing you could have done to prevent those awful things from occurring.<p>There are lots of simple statements around luck and happiness.  Nobody argues whether or not you&#x27;re lucky to be born rich, healthy, tall, attractive, etcetera.  But people argue over whether or not intelligence is driven largely by nature or by nurture.  Experts even argue over whether or not happiness itself is largely determined by genetics.<p>The general takeaway is luck is by definition what you cannot control so it&#x27;s a fool&#x27;s errand to try to do so.  But success is what happens when luck stumbles across someone who was prepared to take advantage of it.  Zuckerberg may have been lucky to have been at Harvard when he was, but he immediately saw the opportunity and turned it into Facebook - and (love him or hate him) he deserves credit for that.