As a species, most human beings work hard to get to where they want to be in their lives. From the valiant doctors all around the globe who risked life and limb to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic; the rags to riches CEO gracing the cover of Forbes Magazine, and everyone in between.
Which begs the question, if success is the direct result of hard work, how come the 1% remains, well, just 1%? George Monbiot famously remarked: “If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.” I am sure that’s true of billions of people across the planet.
Which leads me to another point of inquiry. What’s the role of risk in your life? How much of your success in life would you say was out of sheer luck?
As you ponder on that, here’s an excerpt from Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money:
“Luck and risk are siblings. They are both the reality that every outcome in life is guided by forces other than individual effort. They are so similar that you can’t believe in one without equally respecting the other. They both happen because the world is too complex to allow 100% of your actions to dictate 100% of your outcome.”