People shouldn't just sit there hoping for their luck to change (although if they do, they might still have an interesting life, even if not quite "successful"). But they shouldn't obsess about goals, self-improvement and control, either, and should learn to accept life's many surprises. Or, they can choose not to accept them and to obsess about control - hey, that's cool too. After all our existence is absurd. Life's absurd.

I didn't even imply that effort directed in the opposite way breeds failure. There are no doubt (rare) examples of people with a strong self-sacrificing mindset becoming successful despite those - just no one I know or have observed personally... Most lottery winners presumably fall into this category.

Chance can work both ways, but if you rely only on chance, the chance itself says you probably won't "succeed" for any given definition of success. Success is rare. Even if you fight tooth and nail you may not succeed, but you can perhaps change a 0.001% probability into a 10% probability, or a 0.01% probability into a 90% probability. That's worth fighting for.

Simple counter-example of your "chance rules all" idea: if your goal is to become a famous writer, there's nothing you can do to make success certain - but if you never write anything, you can guarantee failure.

I know you were using that as a counter-example but this immediately came to mind (from a successful writer)

> It has never been easy for me to understand why people work so hard to create something beautiful, but then refuse to share it with anyone, for fear of criticism. Wasn’t that the point of the creation – to communicate something to the world? So PUT IT OUT THERE. Send your work off to editors and agents as much as possible, show it to your neighbors, plaster it on the walls of the bus stops – just don’t sit on your work and suffocate it. At least try. And when the powers-that-be send you back your manuscript (and they will), take a deep breath and try again. I often hear people say, “I’m not good enough yet to be published.” That’s quite possible. Probable, even. All I’m saying is: Let someone else decide that. Magazines, editors, agents – they all employ young people making $22,000 a year whose job it is to read through piles of manuscripts and send you back letters telling you that you aren’t good enough yet: LET THEM DO IT. Don’t pre-reject yourself. That’s their job, not yours. Your job is only to write your heart out, and let destiny take care of the rest.

http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/writing.htm

All the wind really does is provide power, it's up to you to decide how you want to use that power.

If people just sit there, like you said, they are not optimizing for success at all. They are just doing nothing, missing chances, waiting for something to fall into their lap. That can work, but probability of success is lower.

Life is what you make it - your opinion and view of the world definitely falls into the category "can change".

There's a fine line between saying that you can make a difference in what happens to you, and saying that everything happens to you because of you. The latter is blatantly false, and leads to some perverted philosophies...

Anyway, that's just my guess as to why you're being downvoted...

That.

Of course one should try and reverse his situation to where he wants to go.

With that as a given, seeing your situation as your sole personal responsibility is a blindfold, that makes people not understanding how their society works and blaming themselves for irrational things. It also hinders progress, because it doesn't let you see and address systemic failures outside of yourself.

A black man that wanted to succeed in the '40s shouldn't just "improve himself" and "work on it", etc, he should also work with others to bring down segregation and racism. All else would be futile.

> "If somebody swears at you in traffic, you decide if you just shrug on it ("He's had a bad day") or freak out, swear back, and think about it for the rest of the day."

and

> "I am convinced that what most people call luck or bad luck is partly due to their own decisions (previous or current)."

These two statements have no relation to each other.

The first one is obviously true. The second one is much more ambiguous - and comes with a lot of baggage. The same stance has been used to blame the victim throughout history, and continues today. For example, we continue to blame the poor for their own poverty, despite putting up barriers at every turn for them. It's a despicable stance that is entirely devoid of compassion or perspective, and does no good except to inflame the ego of the accuser.

You can't reason from my first argument to the second, that's correct. But it's hard to deny that we are responsible for our reactions, as illustrated by the traffic example. If life rains down on you as a startup founder (no real progress or no funding for a year), you can react by giving it all up, or just continue for some more months. The latter will increase your chances of success, naturally - it's a simple statistics game of throwing the dice more often. That's why I'm convinced that everybody forges a PART of her own destiny - it's my opinion, no fact ;)

Or people blame the blacks for being poor and "underachieving", not understanding that they started off in the US as slaves (much worse than anyone starting off as a poor migrant), and were still under segregation rules and heavy racism until at least the 60's.

Slave parents aren't exactly a guarantee of success. Sharecroppers parent's (the next generation) aren't either. Then, if you play your cards correctly, you end up with country and urban dirt poor parents, and maybe a small percentage of them can get to middle class --while still seen under suspicion by the wealthier and more white middle and upper class.

That a few people can overcome those things and be, say, even the first black President, doesn't mean that statistically everybody can --you don't judge a population by the outliers. The truth is, if they can get to college or get rich, for example, it's a far greatest achievement than the children of a 3rd generation immigrant achieving the same thing.