In statistics, they teach you the concept of probability. It’s quite simple and conceivable. Suppose a raffle draw is taking place at the end of your office picnic. There are 150 participants and the winner will get a refrigerator. According to statistics, the probability that your name will be picked up in the draw is 1 divided by 150 or approximately 0.67%. Thus, you have less than a one percent chance of getting the refrigerator. Now suppose your name comes up in the raffle draw. All your friends and colleagues are saying that you are a lucky guy. So, what is luck?
If some lottery tickets have 6-digit numbers then mathematically the probability of winning the lottery is only 0.000001 for every ticket. This means the chance of winning the lottery for any ticket is one in a million only, still, there is always a lucky person who wins the lottery. Can we then define luck as attainment that exceeds its probability of occurring?
Let’s look into other situations where, unlike the raffle, an individual’s skill and efforts matter a lot, for example, job interviews. Suppose you have applied for a dream job in a company. There are only two openings but the number of applicants is more than five thousand. With your strong qualifications and competence, you made it to the top tier among these thousands of candidates. However, you narrowly missed the first two positions. You came out third on the merit list. That’s indeed unlucky!
Dr. Derek A. Muller, a Science Communicator, asserts that people need both skill and luck for success. And the importance of luck increases with the intensity of competition such as NASA’s selection of 11 astronauts from 18,300 applicants in 2017. Dr. Muller simulated the selection with a model assigning a luck score along with skill weighted in the 95 (skill) to 5 (luck) ratio. He ran the simulation a thousand times and found that the selected astronauts had very high luck scores. So, having skill and competence is not enough, you have to have a pinch of luck as well.
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This article was published in the Daily Sun on November 16, 2022. Please read the full article here or here.