There seems to be this overwhelming effort these days to attribute the success of successful people as either entirely due to luck and/or to inheritance.

The allure of this belief is, of course, the self-gratification that comes with not having to blame your own lack of success on yourself.

My company acts as an incubator for insurance agencies, of the many dozens we've setup, most fail, and maybe 20% succeed. What's interesting is how evident it is which ones will fail, and which will succeed within the first month of working with them.

Those that succeed demonstrate hard work, intelligence, and thoughtfulness in their work. ...and it's not easy finding those three things in one person.

Those that fail tend to have any number of personality flaws ("flaws" might be too harsh a word) that prevents them from succeeding. Many are emotional, which drives them to be very cyclic in their motivation level. Others lack the analytical skills to manage their cash flows. Some burn relationships by being consistently combative. It's honestly easy to ruin a startup - almost any major personality flaw will corrupt such a small team and alienate people.

Luck follows the laws of averages - over enough time, the good luck balances out with the bad luck - whereas hard work and intelligence are persistent. Our successful agencies have each had their own story, and been successful at different speeds, but all ultimately made it.

>There seems to be this overwhelming effort these days to attribute the success of successful people as either entirely due to luck and/or to inheritance.

>The allure of this belief is, of course, the self-gratification that comes with not having to blame your own lack of success on yourself.

You've gotten this exactly backwards.

Until recently the overwhelming story (at least in the US) is that success is purely a result of your own personal effort, the self-made man who builds himself ex nihilo by the sweat of his brow and his genius. What's been happening recently is the recognition that this is, of course, ridiculous, and that many factors go into success or failure. It's not that your success or failure are entirely out of your control and your own efforts (or personality, as you seem to indicate) mean nothing, it's just that there's more to it. For example, what you describe in your post sounds like a classic case of survivorship bias in action.

The allure of this belief is, of course, the self-gratification that comes with believing you are simply superior to others and that's why you're successful. There's also much comfort in believing that bad things only happen to people who deserve it and so can't happen to me, since I'm smart and hardworking. The discomfort with acknowledging outside factors is having to admit that your success is not entirely your own doing, which is scary and hurts one's ego.

If I replace your interpretation of ethical back from emotional, your post seems to be restating the article.

Do you think the current President of the US is a hard worker? Yet he is at the top of the tree. Going back a bit further Reagan was known for his laid back approach, he even quipped about it himself: "It's true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure, why take the chance?"

Also, you need to be solving the right question.

How do you define huge success?

You can be extremely success without talent or hard work. But luck will always play a factor.