If someone considers himself talented or super-smart, then he can safely give up on all this, because he is unlikely to achieve the success he deserves.
However, if you are a commonplace mediocrity, you have nothing to worry about. Luck is undoubtedly on your side.
This sad conclusion was reached by three researchers led by physicist Alessandro Plucino from the University of Catania (Italy), according to the results of the first simulation of the role that luck and talent play in life.
The meritocratic paradigm that is shaping Western culture, they say, “is based on the belief that success is due primarily or even exclusively to personal traits such as talent, intelligence, skill, savvy, effort, willfulness, hard work, or risk taking.”
Of course, this is all good, but there is a number of evidence - researchers cite as an example "a lot of literature" - to support the view that having a mind does not in itself guarantee success in life.
There is also, according to them, a very obvious discrepancy between innate ability and the end result. They note that qualities such as intelligence or talent are found in every population and are distributed according to a bell-shaped curve - with very smart and impenetrably dumb people on both ends of the graph and with a lot of middlemen in the middle.
Success in any population is extremely unevenly distributed. This can be described on the graph as an exponential relationship. A very small number of immensely wealthy people at one end of the curve, followed by the long tail of the rest - much less successful.
Supporting this is the 2017 Oxfam report, which shows that the eight richest people on earth own as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion.
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The assumption that these eight lucky ones are the most talented, intelligent and skillful in the world is a priori absurd. Therefore, their success must definitely be due to something else. And this, say Plucino and his colleagues, is luck, luck or accident - call it what you want.
They note that social or occupational benefits can largely depend on random factors that are not affected by innate abilities.
Names are an example. There are studies showing that scientists whose last names begin with the first letters of the alphabet are more likely to be successful.
People using middle names are considered smart. Those lucky ones whose name is easy to pronounce get better positions. Men with resounding names are more likely to become managers than remain workers at the machine. And female lawyers with masculine-sounding names are more likely to be sought after by clients than their female counterparts with feminine names.
And, of course, some types of accidents affect fate so clearly that no one notices. For example, a Boston-born person is much more likely to get a job at a Fortune 500 company than a poor guy born in Bangladesh.
However, the relationship is not a causal relationship, and Pluchino and his team wondered if it was possible to build a model that shows the effect of luck on success? And what do you think? It turns out.
Scientists have created a multi-agent computer model. A large number of individuals were gathered in a closed "world". Each of the participants received a certain amount of talents, and this amount did not change throughout the course of the experiment.
Also, each was allocated the same amount of money (or, to be more precise, capital). However, the amount may vary depending on what has been happening since the launch of the model.
The researchers also introduced a number of randomly distributed units of "luck" with plus and minus signs. Then luck and people interacted in the "world" for a period equivalent to 40 years. If a person failed, his capital was halved. If he was lucky, then his capital doubled. (The amount of talent in the model, as we recall, did not change.)
Pluchino and his colleagues have repeatedly run the model with some variations, but the result has always been essentially the same.
"The most successful agents were almost never the most talented," they report. "They were usually average."
The result, they add, shows the importance of successful events in achieving life success, and this influence is often underestimated or overlooked.
The results also seem to corroborate the less rigorous conclusions drawn earlier by many authors - in this world, the rich get richer, and the smart gradually get angry.
“Since awards and resources are usually given to those who have already achieved significant success, this is mistakenly considered a measure of their competence / talent,” the scientists note. "This result is a deterrent, closing the window of opportunity for the most talented."
Sergey Afanasiev