On Luck

There is this joke about Goldman Sachs. An assistant hands a Managing Director at Goldman a thick pile of resumes. The Managing Director shuffles the pile, throws half into the shredder, and says "I don't hire unlucky people."

The Managing Director may be right. Luck is the defining characteristic of all successful people. If he wants successful employees, he should select from the lucky ones.

I come from a culture that firmly believes in luck. The fengshui of a casino table is supposed to determine the thickness of one’s wallet at the end of the day. The auspicious creature pixiu at the gate of a mansion is supposed to fend off bad luck and draw the qi of fortune. The sign of mature wisdom is zhi tianming—to know your own fate.

I think the Chinese are wise to show reverence for luck. After all, nothing else explains returns in a casino better. However, the Chinese are mistaken to think they can influence luck.  We cannot alter an outcome by changing the seating arrangement at the casino table or through the worship of an animal statues. Thinking that we can is superstition.

But we are above superstition now—we have science. We can now formally and mathematically define luck. Luck is the sum of a series of statistical noises that are uncorrelated with our control input. In other words, it is the aggregation of things that affect our life possibilities, which we have no control over.

This definition can greatly reduce the range of phenomena that used to be considered the result of luck. After graduation, I will be predicting short term price movements in the stock market. This used to be a line of work not dissimilar to astrology and tarot reading, but now, it is dominated by astrophysicists and statisticians. Life and death used to be in the hands of God, but modern medicine now understands risk factors that affect our chance of mortality. Modern science is brimming with hope that one day, we can understand and dominate all that is uncertain in our lives. But we are far from that day. There will always be a force, outside of our control, that decides our destiny.

So why am I talking about something that we cannot master?

First, we simply need to acknowledge the existence of luck.  We have a natural tendency to attribute things that happen by chance to actions of individuals. An NBA coach can be praised or blamed for his tactics in the last seconds of a game, even though whether the ball goes in the basket or not can be as random as a coin flip. The effect is even stronger when people evaluate their own success or failure. Those who have succeeded have the self-serving bias—they tend to believe it is their hard work, rather than luck, that leads to their fortune.

Most of us, Harvard students with all the modern conveniences, have been blessed with luck at many points in our lives. I am prone to believe that my hard work and decision making are responsible for my graduation from Harvard, and I need a sobering voice to remind me of my propitious circumstances.

Let’s go back to the Goldman Sachs joke. It is a silly hiring strategy because past luck is not correlated with future luck. While most of us have been lucky thus far, it is not guaranteed that the streak will last. Many of us aspire to change the world, and it will take a tremendous amount of luck to do so. Many of us will fail, not because we have not worked hard enough or have made the wrong decisions, but because of circumstances that we cannot control.

What can we do when luck fails us? I do not know, because I have never had any great misfortunes. I have had small misfortunes, though, many of which happened on poker tables. I have played my hands perfectly and lost by incredibly long shots. Should I have left the table when luck failed me? I think the right thing to do was to keep doing what I was doing before, knowing that it worked and can work in the future. I hoped for the best.

Jonathan Z. Zhou ’14 is an applied mathematics concentrator in Eliot House.