Luck. It is a factor.
Inputs don’t equal outputs.
Bad decisions are rewarded, and good ones punished.
How do we explain it?
Luck. Randomness. Chance.
Two kids head out to sell pepperoni sticks for their little league. It’s a fundraiser for new uniforms. One kid gets home, and his father’s friends are over drinking beer and making bad decisions. The kind of guys a smart kid tries to avoid. On this day they have something to offer, and they buy up the whole box of pepperoni sticks before sending the boy off to his room without dinner.
Damn the luck.
The other boy has a loving family. His father wants to teach him a thing or two, so he walks the kid around the neighborhood and shows him how to make a sales pitch, look people in the eye, deal with rejection, the whole lot. And after a few days the kid sold half his box.
Unlucky bastard.
James Cameron famously said, “Hope is not a strategy, luck is not a factor, failure is not an option,” while filming Avatar. Easy for him to say. Cameron is a brilliant writer and director, but he’s had some luck along the way. His family moved from Ontario to Orange County when he was in high school, and he later started in the film industry as a model maker for Roger Corman Studios. Maybe he would have made the leap to LA at some point anyway, but his parents picking Orange County made it that much easier, that much less risky, to get his foot in the door. Pretty lucky for a kid with his skill set to land smack dab in the heart of the entertainment industry, don’t you think?
He knows better. Luck is always a factor.
Okay, back to the kids.
Suppose they both come from good homes. Lucky!
And both hit the same neighborhood to sell those meat sticks. One kid is likely to stumble upon a generous old lady who buys him out, even has him in for milk and cookies, and the kid dubs himself a “rainmaker” for the whole damn baseball season.
Meanwhile, the other kid knocked on doors in the same neighborhood and didn’t even sell his allotment, had to run laps at practice.
It feels good to get the credit for that lucky break, and once you hear the story enough times you might even believe it.
Those kids though, same product, same script, same skill.
Same inputs, different output.
How do we explain it?
Luck.
Now of course, you needed to have some skill. Can’t blow the sale completely. Does that make you a rainmaker? You had to carry the pepperoni without dropping it in the gutter. You had to make proper change for a buck, had to smile and be pleasant, but let’s not fool ourselves, luck is what closed the big deal. Taking a left instead of a right.
Input: Kid, meat, neighborhood.
Output: Big sale…or schlepping that meat all the way home.
You can play this out a thousand ways.
Maybe the kid doesn’t sell his pepperoni, but he gets lucky in other ways. He meets the girl and asks her out, gets married, lives happily ever after. Not bad.
And for the rainmaker, maybe he closes the deal but while walking home, belly full of cookies, counting that cash money, he gets chased down a gravel road by the local Doberman pincher and sprains his ankle. Misses the season. Tells himself he’ll never sell pepperoni sticks again. Too dangerous!
You have control, but not total control.
You choose the direction, but the path is unpredictable.
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