In Homer’s Iliad the heroes strike blows and fire arrows that on their own may not be enough to do the job. But time and again the Gods step in, whether Apollo or Zeus or whichever God favours that particular combatant. The Gods guide the arrow to its target or protect them from the blows, they give thanks and know that they couldn’t have achieved such a feat on their own. Is this just another example of a primitive way of thought that humanity has long-since grown out of, or is there a deeper wisdom here?
Perhaps instead of simply being filled with outdated superstition, the Ancient Greeks knew how to keep humble, to acknowledge the role of the gods and fate in every day life. Whether it’s a specific deity, or the forces of fate, or random quantum fluctuations in the universe, chance plays a far greater role than many people acknowledge. Whereas today, a great many people in business and other fields attribute their success solely to their own brilliance, and rarely acknowledge the role that fortune might have paid.
The Greeks had a word for this ὕβρις (hubris), which has found its way into modern English with a more or less similar meaning. Some Ancient Greeks would incur the wrath of the Gods very directly, claiming outright to be superior in some field, such as Arachne who claimed to be the greatest weaver, and was promptly turned into a spider by Athena, or Niobe who boasted her 14 children were superior to Leto’s two, those two Apollo and Atermis promptly killed her fourteen.
If a specific God didn’t intervene quite so personally and directly, then the Goddess Νέμεσις (Nemesis) was always on hand to extract her retribution. This winged avenging deity punished injustice and particularly hubris wherever she found it, and thus were the Greeks reminded to not to get ahead of themselves and to appreciate the role of fortune in their success. Similar wisdom appears in many other places, including the Book of Proverbs where it’s loosely translated into the aphorism ‘pride goes before a fall’.
Yet thousands of years of repetition of this wisdom is never quite enough to ensure people take heed. Much has been made of the role of chance in success in the market. Warren Buffet talks about a national coin-flipping contest where the entire US bets a single dollar on the outcome of a coin toss, then the winning half bets again and so on. Based on a population of 225 million, after 10 flips there will be roughly 220,000 people still in the race, who have got every call right, and won about $1000 each.
” Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is. They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.” he writes
After another 10 days there will around 215 still in the race, now each worth about $1 million.
“By then, this group will really lose their heads. They will probably write books on “How I turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning.” Worse yet, they’ll probably start jetting around the country attending seminars on efficient coin-flipping and tackling skeptical professors with, ” If it can’t be done, why are there 215 of us?“
Nassim Taleb has expanded on his further in Fooled by Randomness and his subsequent books, where he looks at a fictional composite who has been successful for a time in the market, and naturally boastful, who then suffers a reversion to the mean. What looked like a smart strategy was just chance and eventually his luck runs out, or perhaps he was visited by Nemesis.
A great blog from Scientific American in 2018 brings together a substantial amount of research on the topic, from those studies which show how birth month or the first letter of your name can substantially impact career success to more recent academic research on the topic.
So, the wheel of fortune can turn and what goes up can come down again. We should be wary of taking too much credit for what can actually be attributed to chance. But what about hubris, the sin of pride, arrogant boastfulness? Surely our luck may turn either way, and how we respond to good fortune may help us psychologically but can’t actually impact the outcome? Or were the Greeks right amount Nemesis too – can our boastfulness actually bring about a downfall?
It is possible that in business, in sport, in other areas of life, the more you boast about your own smarts, your own role in your success, the more you set yourself up for that eventual reckoning with fate. Spectacular corporate collapses like Enron and Theranos followed an immense amount of hype.
As Bethany McLean wrote in The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (and the book title itself clearly gives away the attitude in question) “The tale of Enron is a story of human weakness, of hubris and greed and rampant self-delusion; of ambition run amok; of a grand experiment in the deregulated world; of a business model that didn’t work; and of smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last disaster—and who couldn’t admit they were wrong.”
Beyond the most memorable collapses, it has actually been shown there is a link between a business or individual getting a positive cover story in a major publication (the 2007 study in question looked at Forbes, Business Week and Bloomberg) and an imminent decline in positive performance. A similar phenomenon has been observed in professional sports with the Sports Illustrated Cover jinx.
What should we conclude from this – is all success in life really luck, and if so is there any point in even trying? It would certainly be a comforting thought when pondering your own lack of success, anyone more successful than you probably got there based on their good luck and if only you’d had a bit of their luck you’d be right up there. But to use this attitude to foster a sense of envy would be to miss the point. Rather than worry about the role of luck in other’s success, we would do better to reflect on the role of luck in our own.
Even if you’ve never experienced the business highs of an Enron or a Theranos, or beaten the market for 20 years straight – consider first the luck to born in the country, time and situation you were, the natural skills you were born with, and the hundreds of small chances in your life that went the right way. Perhaps you don’t need to thanks Zeus or Apollo specifically, I’ll leave it to your individual conscience whether you want to invoke any particular deity or a more random force, but by being more aware of the chance events that got you where you are today, you may be better placed to appreciate them and to make the sorts of decisions that will help your keep luck-won gains.