Luck or skill

It is helpful to distinguish between the effects of luck and skill. Our human bias is generally to attribute most of our success to skill and that of those around us to luck. Of course, that isn’t very helpful.

The ability to seeing things as they are versus how we’d like them to be is a particularly powerful habit. And, yes, it is a habit. In this case, distinguishing between luck and skill helps us in two ways.

First, it helps us make better decisions by virtue of us having the right map. Imagine being stuck in a new city and following the wrong map. That’s how we’d make decisions if we aren’t truly aware of what our skills are. It is a critical component of self awareness.

Second, it helps us learn more from those around us. If we get good at identifying the valuable skills that others possess, we can both learn from them and, in cases where those skills are complementary, make it a point to surround ourselves with people with those skills in the future.

At the end of the day, how we deconstruct success into luck and skill is still just our point of view. But, it is important we attempt to do so periodically and test our assumptions from time to time. The more we can move this from our truth to “the truth,” the better for us and those around us.