Sounds like a post-hoc fallacy to me. Or maybe a &quot;just so story&quot;.  You can always unwind somebody&#x27;s story and find some point in the story where something happened that they could not necessarily have predicted, and cry &quot;see, this person only succeeded because of luck&quot;.  But we can&#x27;t evaluate all the branches in the tree of outcomes that <i>didn&#x27;t happen</i> exactly because they didn&#x27;t happen.<p>If you believe that people, <i>to some extent</i> &quot;make their own luck&quot; via their choices and actions, then you could just as easily speculate that if &quot;lucky event A&quot; didn&#x27;t happen, then something else &quot;lucky&quot; would have happened anyway.