Meh. &quot;Luck&quot; isn&#x27;t something you can count on, sustainably, over a period of time.  You can be &quot;lucky&quot; (whatever that means) at a point in time, but that only gets you so far.  Was billg lucky that IBM hired MS to provide an OS for the PC, and that he was able to acquire QDOS from SCP for dirt cheap?  Sure... but can you attribute everything since then to a continued, non-stop string of lucky events?<p>Now, you might ask, &quot;well, what if the DOS thing didn&#x27;t happen?&quot;  And the thing is, we&#x27;ll never know, because it did happen.  But if you believe that gates, ballmer, allen, etc. were smart, hard-working and talented, it seems likely they would still have ultimately been &quot;successful&quot; in some fashion, even if the story unfolded quite differently.<p><i>Luck and network are the single most defining factors of why some are successful</i><p>I don&#x27;t know if we&#x27;ll ever be able to actually quantify and measure that, but my suspicion is that grit&#x2F;perserverance&#x2F;will are at least as important as luck and&#x2F;or network.<p>But keep in mind, there are many levels of &quot;success&quot;. Life isn&#x27;t as binary as &quot;wound up homeless and sleeping in a gutter&quot; vs. &quot;wound up a billionaire CEO&quot;.