Emerson's Essay Shallow Men Believe In Luck

Luck is many times considered silly or just part of someone’s imagination, but it can really play a big role in what becomes of an individual. In the first chapter, titled “The Matthew Effect”, we

Joseph Conrad once said, “It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck”. Nailer, the main character of Paolo Bacigalupi’s book Ship Breaker, wasn’t born lucky, he was born a ship breaker. Ship breakers are child and adult laborers who spend their days starving, poor, and working away to take the anything valuable off old ships for the big companies. Throughout Nailer’s life, he has suffered through various unfortunate events. However, with a strong belief of luck and having other superstitions, his life becomes more manageable. In Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi demonstrates that being superstitious and believing in various degrees of luck allows people to more easily feel in control of uncontrollable situations.

The first century Roman philosopher Seneca said, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” A lot of folks have echoed that sentiment over the millennia. Luck favors those who don’t depend upon it. Sure, some things are mostly about luck. Las Vegas comes to mind. But mostly, we must make our own luck by taking advantage of every opportunity we recognize or create.

But of the people who do achieve success, I say it is luck far more than anything else that drives it.

There may be no topic that more easily divides two set of people more than when they talk about success and luck. Some of them find it easy to associate success with luck rather than hard work and talent. Many conservatives would be the one to celebrate success as an almost imminent result of talent, effort, and hard work. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that even when people who work hard and are talented could sometimes fall when hard times are presented and associate that with luck. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, argues that factors and circumstances are those that will determine the person’s success rather than then hard work and effort. Many people would disagree with Malcolm Gladwell. The way that Gladwell portrays luck throughout his entire book makes success look like it is solely based on just pure luck; success has much more to it than just luck. It is true that luck can bring up opportunities but hard work can guarantee you to succeed in those opportunities. To be able to critique Gladwell on his argument on how luck will make you be successful, his words need to be carefully analyzed. The position many are standing in when it comes to actually critiquing Gladwell, is that luck can only take you so far but hard work and talent will cover the voids when luck is something that happens by chance. With hard work and talent, you actually create that

Success or failure in life is created by how you think. A mindset that is fixed in stone believing you either have talents and abilities or you don't leads to failure.

Constitutive luck, according to Nagel, refers to “the kind of person you are, where this is not just a question of what you deliberately do, but of your inclinations, capacities, and temperament.” The idea here is that who we are is influenced by many factors, such as our parents or culture, that are out of our control and, if such is true, then who we are is largely a matter of luck. People can be selfish, cowardly, conceited, and so on simply because they were raised as such. These vices, which are seemingly out of our control, condition a person to have certain feelings under certain circumstances. Whether or not we act on our vices

The second type of luck, circumstantial, was described as “luck in one’s circumstances – the kind of problems and situations one faces”, (Nagel, p.28). The drunken drivers’ example belongs to the third type of luck: resultant luck. To many philosophers, the third and fourth type of luck is accountable for one which deals with the causes and effects of action, as Nagel explains, “luck in how one is determined by antecedent circumstances, and luck in the way one’s action and projects turn out.”, (Nagel, p.28). The commonality of these four categories of luck is the idea that “one cannot be more culpable or estimable for anything than one is for that fraction of it which is under one’s control. It seems irrational to take or dispense credit or blame for matters over which a person has no control, or for their influence on results over which he has partial control.” (Nagel, p.28).

You are one of the lucky ones, even if you were betting on a different outcome. There is no reason to deny the existence of luck, chance, randomness and possibility in our infinite universe. There is good reason to not rely on it, bet on it, blame it for our failures or attribute our success to luck. Luck is not the hand of fate or any such controlling influence in life. Luck is not a force to be reckoned with, or a power that controls events. Luck refers to our experience of an infinite universe that is beyond our control. We call it good luck when we benefit and bad luck when we do not, but we are only talking about whether or not we benefit from the way it is; and that is a matter of our ability to appreciate, plan, and choose wisely — or not. Do not attribute success or failure to luck. Do not think of luck as an agent, or agency, or controlling factor in the game we play. It is not. Luck is involved wherever and whenever there is more than one possible

There are times in life that we attribute good luck to our hard work, dedication or talent but there are some other times when we can say that luck is just a chance that we get. As we can see on the work of this two authors James H. Austin the author of “Four kinds of chance” published in Saturday Review and Robert H. Frank author of “why luck matters much more than you think” published in The Atlantic (May 2016) they show the reader how chances can influence in different ways. After reading their work I consider Robert H Frank article more effectively fulfills his thesis.

People achieve their goals through hard work. Michael Jordan isn't great basketball player because he was born that way. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, didn't get to her spot without any effort. When I started playing guitar, I didn't learn the instrument without any work. Instead of luck, it's through dedication, perseverance, and commitment that people succeed.

They gained success through hard work and their achievements, which luck had no part in.

Is success earned through hard work or is it pure luck? For Pele, "Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do" (Arrantes 1). In “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie, he illustrates his perseverance and hard work towards his love for reading and learning to read in order to be successful in his career as a writer. Through his use of his past experience of learning to read, Alexie demonstrates his intelligence and use of determination in order to create an ethos of a writer to evoke motivation towards his audience.

Why can't you be successful? Maybe the only reason people are successful is simply because of luck. Benjamin Franklin once stated that diligence is the mother of good luck. While there are factors in our lives that can’t be controlled, ultimately it’s up to the individual to overcome their obstacles. With that being said many of the factors that can not be controlled can expand an individual's success.

Most of us have similar opinion about the term of success. Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outlier, have different assumption than most us, such as the link to success, what people overvalue, and what we undervalue. First, what links to success? There are many circumstance that effect you chance to success. To begin with, talent is one of the conditions that leads you to the success. For example, having better trait compare to other individual will make yourself outstanding, so you have the better chance being hire. Additionally, without effort, you chance become success for will likely to decrease. For instance, even if you were born talented, without the effort, you will not be able to make use of it. In the end, you basically wasted your