Why it’s often luck, not talent, that takes us to the top

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In Never, Rick Astley’s recent autobiography, the ’80s pop star describes how looking back over decades gave him a fresh appreciation of one critical factor in his success. “You see how much luck and chance is involved in your life and career,” he writes in the prologue. “You can have drive and ambition and talent, but there’s a huge amount of luck involved too: you know, someone wrote a three-and-a-half-minute pop song in 1987, and my life completely changed as a result of that. It’s ridiculous, really.”

This particularly resonated. Not just because I’ve always admired Astley for appearing to remain normal in a volatile industry (though Never shows it was more complicated than that). But also because the perspective of age does make you appreciate the seemingly arbitrary nature of success. When I look back at peers who have done well in their careers, for some it was always inevitable: they hustled harder, or their talent was inarguable. But for others it looks like chance.

I was reminded of Astley after switching off a radio interview with an author — who will remain unnamed — the other day. The account of the forces shaping their writing was pleasant enough, rattling through a narrative of a home filled with books and parents who nurtured their love of stories.

It was the omission that was my flash point. The author left out their huge luck in having access to a vast familial financial cushion enabling them to scratch out time to write in a climate when writers’ earnings are more precarious than ever. That’s not to discount their writing talent but to place it alongside their great fortune. We are not good at talking about such luck because it doesn’t fit with our obsession with striving and talent. Ascribing every success to chance alone would make us all withdraw to our beds — hardly the stuff of motivational posters.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, organisational psychologist and author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?, estimates that luck counts for 55 per cent of success “if we define it as everything that isn’t talent or effort”. In that he includes the “lottery of life”, such as money, where you’re born and your parents.

In a 2016 paper, researchers Chengwei Liu and Mark de Rond saw luck as playing such a significant role that they mischievously suggested emulating the method of lottocracy employed during the ancient Greek and Venetian Republics and selecting corporate leaders at random, since “there may only be small differences in skill among corporate stars”. One effect, they say, would be to reduce income inequality, because we wouldn’t need to reward arbitrarily chosen leaders so highly.

Acknowledging luck’s role downplays our own specialness. Sam Friedman, co-author of Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite, told me that those he spoke to at the top of politics, business, cultural institutions and the professions put talent above luck in explaining their success. In interviews, many deployed it as “a refrain, a linguistic means to distance oneself from the suggestion of intentional or strategic career-building behaviour. Instead, luck often seemed to be used as a device to frame one’s success as flowing from spontaneous or serendipitous external recognition rather than calculated intention — ‘I was lucky to be recognised by x’ or ‘I was lucky to get y opportunity’.” Rather than being integral to their success, luck seemed to Friedman to serve to deflect from “accusations of power-seeking and hubris”.

Part of the reason we diminish luck’s significance is also that it doesn’t always feel lucky. Sometimes it feels normal — the good chance of being born into a stable society, being healthy and well fed.

Or it can be complicated. One of my biggest career breaks was my dad’s death. At the time it felt utterly miserable. But a subsequent inheritance allowed me a reduced mortgage and to afford to freelance for a couple of years, trying out different topics — a socialite’s party, a hip-hop mogul and an interview with a white witch on her spooky tips for family harmony over the Christmas season. (A dish fusing garlic and butter with a baguette, she suggested mysteriously. Garlic bread, in other words.)

Would I have preferred my dad to live, to enjoy his company, for him to see the birth of his grandchild? Yes, a million yeses. But it would be churlish to deny the opportunity granted by more financial freedom.

The problem with minimising the role of luck is that it underplays the likelihood that it can go the other way. The truth is effort or talent can’t make you wholly immune from misfortune. Divorce, illness, redundancy happen to the best of us. As Astley told me on the phone, the difference between success and failure is a knife edge.

Emma Jacobs is the FT’s work and careers writer

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