I came across this good paper, Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure, that I think everyone should read. To see why I recommend it,  I want to chop up the abstract for the paper because it is jammed packed with good insights.

According to the abstract, in our culture:

The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success.

True that. Most successful people would say that luck had some effect, but it was hard work and talent that got them where they are. Despite that…

.. it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories. It is very well known that intelligence or talent exhibit a Gaussian distribution among the population, whereas the distribution of wealth – considered a proxy of success – follows typically a power law (Pareto law).

Hmmm. Why doesn’t success align with intelligence and talent? Could it be a hidden ingredient?

Such a discrepancy between a Normal distribution of inputs, with a typical scale, and the scale invariant distribution of outputs, suggests that some hidden ingredient is at work behind the scenes.

What could that hidden ingredient be?

In this paper, with the help of a very simple agent-based model, we suggest that such an ingredient is just randomness.

Randomness…i.e., luck.

Money quote:

In particular, we show that, if it is true that some degree of talent is necessary to be successful in life, almost never the most talented people reach the highest peaks of success, being overtaken by mediocre but sensibly luckier individuals.

You may have heard it countless times, but….

As to our knowledge, this counterintuitive result – although implicitly suggested between the lines in a vast literature – is quantified here for the first time.

And because of that, their paper….

…sheds new light on the effectiveness of assessing merit on the basis of the reached level of success and underlines the risks of distributing excessive honors or resources to people who, at the end of the day, could have been simply luckier than others.With the help of this model, several policy hypotheses are also addressed and compared to show the most efficient strategies for public funding of research in order to improve meritocracy, diversity and innovation.

I highly recommend you read the abstract here and the full study here.