Let’s take “luck”, “free will”, “geography”, “race” or any other abstract factors that are beyond a person’s control. Plenty of people are born “white male in a Western democracy”. Only one of them is seven time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady.
Saying it’s all “luck” or whatever removes any agency from a person’s success. Tom Brady didn’t win his position in a random drawing. He had to take steps and make various decisions that ultimately led to where he ended up.
It’s not like you or I ever had a realistic chance of QBing for the Patriots.
Yeah, this is pretty much what I was planning to say…except that I don’t have a wife (or husband). My younger sister and I were just discussing something similar yesterday, and we both felt that luck played a larger role in our comfortable retirements than almost anything else. For her, if she had started her job one year later, she would have fallen on the “wrong” side of the divide when her company was deciding when an employee was eligible and what that eligibility would entitle them to.
Also, though neither my mother nor my father had a college degree, they were both intelligent and passed their genes on to me. I grasped this concept in elementary school when I was asked to mentor or tutor other kids who had been struggling.: “Why can’t they understand this? It’s easy.” I learned pretty early that not everyone started on a level playing field. And that’s not even counting racial issues. Plus neither of my parents were born in California, but we kids being raised here had a ton of advantages other kids didn’t. Living close enough to UCLA to be able to attend classes while in high school. All kinds of small or large things that add up. None of them that I had any control over.
I’ve thought about this a lot, and I come down on the side of it mostly being luck, as well. Among a long list of other things too large to enumerate, I was lucky I was born into a middle class family that had a computer. It wasn’t so precious they couldn’t replace it, so I could mess with it as much as I liked. As a result, I ended up far more employable using computers as a career than any of the other things I was interested in.
Madmonk mostly nailed mine. My scale also goes up to 11, with my final 10% being good at spontaneous BS rather than math.
Seriously, I worked hard for what I got, but my starting so high up due to being upper class, white and male made it almost inevitable that I’d succeed, even with less effort.
I think the one quality that you are possibly missing from your list is ambition.
I think that in our society that defines success as fame and fortune, in order to be at the top of the success ladder you have to desire it too and be willing to make sacrifices and push people out of their way to achieve it. I say this because I feel that the main thing that is keeping me from being more “successful” is my lack of ambition, but that I am probably much happier as I am.
A lot of what makes Tom Brady great is innate, just a lot of it isn’t as easy to measure as strength and speed (btw size is easy to measure and he is tall). He legitimately is very accurate on a level most people would never be able to achieve with any practice regimen. And there’s so many little things where even with training people will run into a genetic barrier - how quickly he releases the ball, how quickly his brain can process what he’s seeing in front of him, etc.
Even training and being able to play is partly genetic. Most people with Brady’s level of motivation and effort are going to break down physically just trying to train the way he trains. And some people just won’t be able to stay healthy in a punishing pro sport no matter what training regimen they have. Chad Pennington looked like a genetic lottery winner compared to Brady when they were both drafted, but it just happens that his body couldn’t take the punishment and recover. Pennington’s ability to stay in the league as long as he did is a testament to his work ethic, but QBs like Brady had genetic gifts that he didn’t have - namely the ability to stay healthy in the NFL.
By “world” I mean " broadly the world we were born into, such as midcentury suburban USA in my case". There were accessible schools, basic public safety and security, a variety of job opportunities in the region, cars were available – that kind of thing.
Hey, can we just f*ck off with the Tom Brady stuff? He’s the absolute edge of his bell curve, which means it has absolutely nothing to do with any of us?
Yes, IMHO you’re correct. Motivation and effort are certainly not the only factors. What I was trying to get across is that working hard is in some sense a talent as well, and some people just don’t have it in them to work hard unless forced to in the same way that others don’t have it in them to run a mile in 5 minutes. Those people, no matter how talented they are in other areas, are unlikely to be successful unless they already started at the top.
If you are going to equate being rich with “success” (which I don’t) then you have to reconcile with the fact that some people are just born successful. Or fall into success by dumb luck (Lottery). Or cheat lie and steal their way to success.
After having already answered the question, I am now rethinking about how this can really be calculated.
I am a highly “successful” statistician. If I had grown up in a Somalian refugee camp, then that would of course have been impossible, so to that extent 100% of my success comes from world. But also if I had been born with severe mental disabilities I could also never have achieved what I did, so it is 100% due to my talent, finally if I had decided to drop out of highschool and spend my days living with my parents and playing video games I also wouldn’t have gotten no where close to where I am, so it was 100% effort.
I think possibly a good way to think about this question, is assuming that all other things about you were equal, how low of a percentile on the human population in a given category could you go and still achieve your success.
So for Tom Brady, yes he worked hard. Maybe only 10% of the population worked towards their sucesss he worked towards his, but even working as hard as he did and living in the same world with the same demographics, and the same level of lucky breaks, only 0.01% of the population would have the innate skills in their field that would allow them to achieve the success he did. So his success is primarily due to his talent.
I consider “success” as requiring deliberate action to achieve some specific goal. Simply being born rich or coming into some windfall isn’t “success”. Neither is “opting out” or being content with mediocrity. Are you really a “success” if all you did was go to school, get whatever grades you were supposed to, get some job at some big company you don’t really care about, marry whoever you are dating in your mid to late 20s and then just grind out a living supporting your family for the next 40 years? Granted a lot of people don’t even have that, but to me it just sort of sounds like the “default”. Like you are successful at being a functioning cog in society.
@Velocity - Another factor in success is overcoming setbacks or adversity. If your startup fails, do you take those lessons learned into your next venture? If a tornado destroys your farm do you…I don’t know…plant more shit (or whatever farmers do)?
I’m a firm believer that a large part of “success” (however you want to define it) is based on the concept that people have some measure of control over what they do and the decisions they make. You might not be able to control what happens to you or the circumstances you were born into. But you do can decide how you react to them.
I’m a white male. Parents were blue collar and divorced when I was 12. Lived with my mother and siblings. She was a secretary making a meager salary, and we were fairly poor. I did poorly in high school and ran with a rough crowd. Even though no one in my immediate or extended family had ever attended college, I applied to engineering school, but was rejected due to bad grades in high school and no letters of recommendation. So the odds were really against me.
I qualified for some college grants due to being so poor, and started attending college. For the first time in my life I buckled down and studied. Took hard classes (physics, calculus, etc.) and did well. Got accepted into engineering school my second year. (They were only accepting three new students at the time, and I was one of them.) Graduated in 1992, and have worked as a full time engineer ever since.
So did I have an advantage for being a white male? I don’t know. I only know I worked my ass off.
When you “ran with a rough crowd” it probably was viewed as being youthful and rebellious. Had you been a Black teenager running with a tough crowd, you would probably have been viewed as a thug, a criminal etc. You may have not been accepted into college having been a thug or criminal. It’s hard to see the advantages we get from not having to deal with certain things that others do. Not everyone gets a second chance.
Perhaps. But when I first went to college (it was a public, state college) I was enrolled in what was called “University College” (as opposed to the school’s Architectural College, Engineering College, etc.) which was primarily for students who didn’t know what they wanted to do. I don’t recall what the acceptance requirements were, but am guessing they accepted just about anyone with a high school diploma.
At any rate, I’m not claiming I didn’t have certain advantages for being a white male. I just know that I worked extremely hard while attending University College, and my grades were finally good enough to get me in to their engineering school.
Sure, working hard and having certain advantages in life aren’t mutually exclusive and everybody’s circumstances in life are different. I just try to keep in mind that there are things that other people have had to deal with their entire lives that I may not even be aware of.
I have a somewhat similar story. Broken home, left when I was 16, completely estranged from my whole family by 30.
I did work hard, 48 years in engineering and physics so far.
But I am sure I had a big advantage being a white male. When I started with my current company 40 years ago, I did not meet a single engineer or scientist who was not a white male, and they mostly still are. All my bosses there have been. I’ve never been followed by a store detective while shopping. Cabs stop for me. I haven’t been in court much, but when I have been, the judge was white like me. The women I work with who have talked about this with me have mostly had sexual harassment issues and I’ve never even given it a thought. Nobody has ever grabbed me at work and kissed me against my will, but both my best friends there, women, have had this happen more than once. My friends who are Black or Hispanic have been pulled over and harassed by police and never have. On and on and on.
The statistics seem to say it made a big difference.
When I was in college and had long hair I got pulled over by the police more than once. But being a white male meant they checked for obvious issues, like drugs, then let me go. I never felt threatened.
My father’s father died when my father was 11, and his mother lost all their money in the Depression and worked as a seamstress. They were living on the edge, but he made a success of himself. But no matter his problems, he did better than he would have if he was Black in the same situation.