Success and Luck
It's been well over a year since I blogged and rather than starting with my reflections on all of the 'whys', I think it best to get straight back into it for fear of never blogging again otherwise.
I just finished listening to a podcast from BBC Radio Four's Thinking Allowed collection called 'Success and Luck'. During the second half (from around 14 minutes), presenter Laurie Taylor and his guests discuss the balance and differences between life's chance opportunities and our own graft, personality and choices. They consider the importance of acknowledging both of these things and their discussion certainly gives some food for thought. The academics in the podcast are far better able to articulate what I was trying to get at in a previous blog post, We are our Choices, and also challenge a few of the ideas I wrote there.
Robert H. Frank of Cornell university introduces his book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy explaining that a cardiac arrest while playing tennis prompted his belief that he is one of the luckiest men alive: his whole outlook on the role of luck in relation to the rhetoric of meritocracy changed. Frank comments that, when told that they are lucky, people can often become angry and can become defensive. Yet when asked to remember and reflect on episodes in their life where they experienced luck, people's reactions can be very different - they can become nostalgic or even excited and are certainly more open to the idea that luck as well as talent and graft played an important role for them.
The book and subsequent discussions in the podcast subvert the idea of meritocracy, reminding people to acknowledge that while talent and hard work are huge factors in their success, without elements of luck and chance opportunities - basically factors outside of their control - their story would be very different.
The discussion moves on to a comparison of this concept in the UK and the USA. Lynsey Hanley from Liverpool John Moores University argues that in the UK we tend to be far more aware of the structured effects of class. She argues that her parents and her grandparents all had the talent to be successful. Yet because she was 'lucky' enough to be born when she was, she was the only one able to go to university and to pave out a career as a successful academic. Her experience, she says, exposes the myth of meritocracy because the merit was always there, but the opportunities were lacking. She comments that she is almost burdened by the knowledge that her successful 'class transition' should have happened to everyone but only happened to her. I can relate to what she says here.
The discussions also bring up questions for me about how we define success. For me, success is less defined by financial wealth or class transition but more so by a person's own sense of contentedness, feeling loved and valued within their family and community and being an active and valued positive change-maker in society and their community. All in all, this is an interesting podcast that helps make sense of thoughts on luck vs. talent, graft and choices, and encourages further reflection on what it means to be successful.