Seth's Blog : Self awareness and the luck-skill gap

Self awareness and the luck-skill gap

One sort of delusion is believing that we’re smart and skilled simply because we got lucky. This perpetuates a cycle of bad decisions that just happened to lead to good outcomes, and causes people to confuse their wins with heard-earned skill.

Often, when someone successful in one field (where they compounded an early lead) moves into another one, they seem arrogant and unwilling to learn and experiment. They were confused about what led to their previous success.

The other sort of delusion works in the other direction. If we’ve done the reading and shown up to do the work, if we’ve built skills and muscles but haven’t succeeded yet, it’s easy to be hindered by self-doubt that might not be valid or useful. Acknowledging the luck we haven’t received yet can open the door to better decisions and more persistence.

Luck is unevenly distributed, unpredictable and unfair. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be luck.