Why You Should Not Tell Your Friends Luck is the Reason for their Success

“Don’t try to tell your successful friends that they’re lucky. We saw that when Obama gave his speech in 2012 and Elizabeth Warren gave a similar speech, people didn’t like that. Those speeches were completely reasonable […], but people didn’t hear the reasonable part. The message they heard was that they didn’t deserve their success.” This recommendation is given by Robert Frank the author of ‘Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy‘, in an interview.

A large part of success is luck, that is not to be denied. However we still ascribe most of it to hard work and talent. Find the right way to investigate which was the share of luck by asking the right question.

He continues”That’s not the message of those speeches. If you want people to think about the fact that they’ve been lucky, don’t tell them that they’ve been lucky. Ask them if they can think of any examples of times when they might have been lucky along their path to the top.”

“I’ve tried this many, many times and can report to you that the successful people who would get angered and defensive if they were reminded that they were lucky, instead don’t get angry or defensive at all when they think about the question, “Can you think of examples of times when you were lucky?” Instead their eyes light up, they try to think of examples, they recount one to you, and that prompts them to remember another one, they tell you about that one too, and soon they’re talking about investments we ought to be making.”