Luck or Hard Work?

Hi friend,

In 1997, Warren Buffett, the famous investor and multi-billionaire, proposed a thought experiment.

“Imagine that it is 24 hours before you are going to be born,” he said, “and a genie comes to you.”

“The genie says you can determine the rules of the society you are about to enter and you can design anything you want. You get to design the social rules, the economic rules, the governmental rules. And those rules are going to prevail for your lifetime and your children’s lifetime and your grandchildren’s lifetime.”

“But there is a catch,” he said.

“You don’t know whether you’re going to be born rich or poor, male or female, infirm or able-bodied, in the United States or Afghanistan. All you know is that you get to take one ball out of a barrel with 5.8 billion balls in it. And that’s you.”

“In other words,” Buffett continues, “you’re going to participate in what I call the Ovarian Lottery. And that is the most important thing that’s ever going to happen to you in your life. It’s going to determine way more than what school you go to, how hard you work, all kinds of things.”

Buffett has long been a proponent of the role of luck in success. In his 2014 Annual Letter, he wrote, “Through dumb luck, [my business partner] Charlie and I were born in the United States, and we are forever grateful for the staggering advantages this accident of birth has given us.”

When explained this way, it’s hard to deny the importance of luck, randomness, and good fortune in life. And indeed, these factors play a critical role.

But let’s consider another story.

The Story of Project 523

In 1969, during the fourteenth year of the Vietnam War, a Chinese scientist named Tu Youyou was appointed the head of a secret research group in Beijing. The unit was known only by its code name: Project 523.

China was an ally of Vietnam, and the project was created to develop antimalarial medications for soldiers. The disease had become as deadly as battle. Just as many Vietnamese soldiers were dying from malaria in the jungle as from enemy fire.

Tu began by digging into anything that could help. She read ancient medical texts. She searched through folk remedies. She traveled to remote areas to study local herbs.

Her team collected over 600 plants and narrowed down nearly 2,000 potential treatments. Slowly, they reduced that list to 380 and tested each one on lab mice.

“This was the most challenging stage of the project,” she said. “It was a very laborious and tedious job, in particular when you faced one failure after another.”

Hundreds of tests failed. But one extract — from the sweet wormwood plant — showed promise. The problem: it didn’t work consistently.

After two years, Tu made a bold decision. They would start over. She reviewed every note, reread every text — and eventually found a single line in a 1,500-year-old medical book that hinted at the answer.

The extract was being heated too much. The active compound was destroyed by high temperature. Tu redesigned the process using a lower-boiling-point solvent.

And it worked — every time.

The Power of Hard Work

Now they needed human trials. But there were no drug-testing facilities in China, and the project was too secretive to go abroad.

So Tu volunteered herself.

In one of the boldest moments in medical history, she and two other members of Project 523 infected themselves with malaria and took the experimental drug.

It worked.

Despite this, Tu’s findings were blocked from being published due to state secrecy. But she didn’t stop. She kept researching, isolated the compound (artemisinin), and later developed a second antimalarial medication.

It took nearly a decade before her research was released globally. And another two decades before the World Health Organization officially endorsed the treatment.

Today, artemisinin has been used over 1 billion times and is credited with saving millions of lives. Tu Youyou became the first female Chinese citizen to win a Nobel Prize, and the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for medical science.

Luck or Hard Work?

Tu Youyou wasn’t unusually lucky.

One fascinating detail about her is that she had no postgraduate degree, no international training, and no membership in any major scientific academy.

But she was persistent, methodical, and willing to risk everything. Her story is proof that effort compounds, even when recognition is delayed.

Just moments ago, it seemed obvious that luck — the Ovarian Lottery — determined most of life’s outcomes.

Now, it seems just as clear that hard work really matters.

So what is it? What drives success — luck or effort?

Let’s go deeper.

Absolute Success vs. Relative Success

Here’s one way to think about it:

Luck matters more in an absolute sense.
Hard work matters more in a relative sense.

In absolute terms, success compared to the whole world is often built on extraordinary luck. Being born in a safe country, at the right time, with access to opportunity — these are foundational.

As the saying goes: "The wilder the success, the more extreme the circumstances."

But in relative terms — comparing yourself to people with similar backgrounds, skills, and resources — habits and effort drive the difference.

Luck explains who starts where.
Choices explain who moves ahead.

As Nassim Taleb put it:
“Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

The Slope of Success

Here’s another way to look at it.

Imagine success as a graph. The vertical axis is results. The horizontal axis is time.

Your starting point — the y-intercept — is determined by luck.

But the slope of that line? That’s effort. That’s behavior. That’s yours to shape.

As it’s been written in one well-known book on habit change:

“It doesn’t matter how successful or unsuccessful you are right now. What matters is whether your habits are putting you on the path toward success. You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results.”

You can’t change where you start. But you can change the slope of the line.

And over time, slope beats position.

How to Get Luck on Your Side

Luck, by nature, is unpredictable. But you can increase your surface area for luck.

In other words: work hard, try more things, move more often.

As Richard Hamming once said:
“The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it.”

Gary Player, the legendary golfer, said it best:
“The harder I practice, the luckier I get.”

Luck will always play a role in your story.

But when it shows up, the way to honor it is to be ready — and to do something with it.

Until next Monday

Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill