Are You Downplaying Luck’s Role in Your Life? - Facts So Romantic
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We’re self-promoters, even to ourselves.Photograph by Alex de Haas / FlickrWhen we succeed, we often take that success, in retrospect, to be the result of suffering that liquid trinity of blood, sweat, and tears. Perhaps fortune favored you here and there but, by and large, it was your effort and talent—not contingency—that won the day. Nonsense, says Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell University and the author, most recently, of Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Just consider the case of the actor Bryan Cranston, a “vivid example,” he says, of the importance of luck’s invisible hand. Cranston got to play Walter White, the school-teacher-turned-meth-dealer in Breaking Bad, because two talented actors, John Cusack and Matthew Broderick, refused the (...)