I recently came across an event where a successful woman shares her stories and strategies for being successful.
I don’t usually seek out success books, but they are difficult to avoid. Consequently, I have encountered most of what this woman has said, including how “if you help others; they will help you in return” and “you make your own luck”. But I am quite different from I was when I read these things as a 20-something-year-old being frustrated at myself for not able to wake up at 6 am for a morning run, meditation, and 2 hours of uninterrupted writing like any successful academic does.
I was intrigued by the propositional content of these claims. At first, I thought her morals were absurd. One of her stories involves a high-power mentor at a party taking an interest in her because she volunteered to cook something and cooked it well. What kind of “making your own luck” is that? Nobody can do what she did and expect her success in return. But then I checked my cynicism. This criterion of “reproducibility of success” seems way too stringent. I don’t think there is anything in life which everyone can follow like recipes and be guaranteed a certain outcome. Reproducibility couldn’t be the demarcation criterion between luck and hard work.
This realization really got me thinking: what is the real difference between someone who claims that their success is all due to “luck and the kindness of people along the way” versus someone whose claim is “hard work and perseverance which my parents instilled in me as a child”, if it’s not the expectation of reproducibility?
I tossed this idea with my friend Christy, who expressed that she would think the “hard work” person arrogant and the “luck” person humble. This aligns with my own intuition. But why? In a sense, when I say that my success is entirely due to luck, what I’m also saying is that nobody else can achieve my success, right? That sounds pretty arrogant. On the flip side, if I say that my success is due to hard work, what I mean is that if you work hard enough you can get where I am, too. Isn’t that a good thing to say?
To be sure, there is often an important political dynamic at play. People who believe in hard work often use it to deny systematic barriers to equity, blame the misfortunate, and reject restorative justice measures. When people attribute success to things within their control (such as hard work or good habits), what they imply is that their success is reproducible. This is often false. In an episode of the podcast Hear to Slay (but of course I can’t for the life of me remember which episode), a guest said something like this (paraphrase): “I get asked a lot by other women of color of how I get to where I am. What they really want to know is how they can get to where I am. And it breaks my heart to tell them that I really believe that our society is not there yet. We are not yet at a stage where there are things women of color can do that can almost guarantee success.” I also have written on this sentiment before.
Nevertheless, there must be more to the luck/hard-work distinction than ethics and politics. It may be the case that many who oppose social welfare cite meritocracy as their reason, but the two ideas are by no means mutually entailing. Even if I genuinely believe that I have achieved all my success through hard work, I may still think that I shouldn’t have had to work as hard as I did, and that other people deserve help. “I worked very hard so my children don’t have to” is a common sentiment among parents, and sometimes extends to other members of a community too.
On the flip side, attributing one’s success to luck does not entail that one is not thereby more deserving than others. We can see this in narratives of “bless” — “she is blessed with such a natural talent” usually does not imply that she doesn’t deserve her success. Moreover, according my extensive research in the form of reading Jane Austen novels, the old idea of nobility was based on neither hard work nor any other acquirable virtues.
If the question of welfare or any other political ideology is not intrinsically connected with either hard work or luck, then we can talk about hard work vs. luck from a purely epistemological perspective. What are we doing when we reflect on the causes of our success? What is the arbiter of truth for such a reflection?
Perhaps we can take an expressivist perspective: when I tell others that I owe my success to hard work, what I’m expressing is that people should work harder. When I say that I owe my success to the kindness of others, I am endorsing being kind, etc. I like this view, though I suspect I’m in the minority here.
This is as far as my thoughts have gone. There may or may not be a paper in the next 5 years on this topic. All ideas welcome.
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