False premise. No two people, even close relatives, will ever have completely identical interests nor will the ever share identical experiences.
I am reminded of Dick Gebhardts “Winner of life’s lottery” asenine comment.
He would have gone on to found Apple?
Windoze would probably work quite a bit better.
I think the author is at least to some extent making a straw man argument.
I don’t know anyone who claims that Bill Gates would have been a failure in life had he not been successful in taking MS to dominance in the software world. The truth is that a number of factors, most of them involving just luck, made the difference between his being one of millions of highly successful people and his becoming the richest man in the world.
Claiming that all success is due to personal prowess and hard work is just as dumb as claiming that it’s all due to luck. Both are pretty obviously involved.
I suppose you could say there was an element of "luck" and wonder what would have happened had Colt never gone aboard a ship, but it was still Colt's genius that allowed an existing technology to be adapted to solve or overcome an existing deficiency in firearms designs.
Preparation + Opportunity = Luck
I know I am a racist, but. . . .
I agree that even identical twins don’t think exactly alike, although they do tend to be very much alike in very many things.
If the one got “lucky” by arbitrarily being in the right place at the right time, then I would expect that the other one would find his own “luck” even if it meant he had to work a bit harder to become successful in some other related but different endeavor.
I think that there are BOTH positive and negative opportunities as much as DAILY in each of our lives, and it all boils down to choices and consequences.
I remember a professor asked my class one time, “Do you know when you became a xxxxx?”
We all chuckled a bit because we were just starting our first classes in that direction, and had not “become” ANYTHING yet, or so we thought.
He rightly corrected us by saying, “You became a xxxxx when you decided that you would do whatever it takes to get there, and that nothing else would satisfy you!”
Of course, he was right.
As the old saying goes -— Life is 1% INSPIRATION, and 99% PERSPIRATION.
It’s that PERSPIRATION part that separates the LUCKY from the UNLUCKY, to my way of thinking!!!
Dumb pretense. Good Article though
You make your own luck
Asimov wrote a short story called “If”, in which a man sitting on a train with his wife was enabled to see what would have happened if one little incident that led to meeting his wife had been different. In the story, the man would have married someone else, taken a different job, etc. At the end, he gets to see where he would have been at that exact moment: sitting on the same train he was on with his original wife. The point was that some things will happen with or without luck. I think the same is true for Bill Gates. If Walter Gates had made DOS and Windows first, Bill would have made something else and still ended up a billionaire.
I can’t recall who wrote it, but someone opined something along the lines of, “Take all of the money from the top 10 percent of our wealthiest citizens. Every last penny. Put them on welfare. Give all of their money to the bottom 10 percent of our poorest citizens. Within five years, the bottom %10 will again be poor and the top %10 will be well on their way to being wealthy again.”
I’d say that is a reasonable expectation.