Over the past five years, I’ve thought more about success and ability than about any other topic. Our society takes it for granted that strong ability leads to success. I’ve long questioned that assumption, and after reading widely and watching how things play out in practice, I’ve come to a conclusion I can now state plainly:

• Success and ability may correlate, but success is not the straightforward product of ability.
• Luck plays a dominant role in who succeeds and who doesn’t.
• Therefore, don’t get conceited if you succeed, and don’t despair if you don’t. In day‑to‑day life, treating success and ability as only loosely related will often serve you better.

This is not a denunciation of success, nor a plea for fatalism or “anything goes.” I’m not arguing that effort is meaningless or that we should ignore skill. Rather, four strands of evidence shifted my view:

1. The Tyranny of Merit

We use ability as a yardstick for success and assume that people who work hard and score well deserve better treatment. That assumption feels natural. But, as Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit, today’s meritocratic ideal often masks deep unfairness—especially when credentials become proxies for virtue.

Consider government. Modern cabinets are filled with elite degrees and PhDs. Yet the United States—whose population includes roughly half in blue-collar work—has barely any legislators with genuine working-class backgrounds. Credentials haven’t delivered a consistently “better” government. Franklin D. Roosevelt, often celebrated as one of America’s greatest presidents, staffed parts of his administration with people who lacked the “right” degrees—or any degrees at all—and yet presided over enormous progress.

Even the credentials we prize are entangled with privilege. Admission to Ivy League schools correlates strongly with family wealth; in Korea, a large share of students at SKY universities come from the highest income deciles. Money doesn’t just open doors; it can manufacture the appearance of “ability”—from test prep to elite extracurriculars.

2. Random Promotion at Mirai Industry—and the Peter Principle

Mirai Industry (MIRAI KOGYO) is a respected Japanese firm that has experimented with unconventional management practices, including, at one point, a so‑called “electric-fan” promotion: names were scattered and a fan determined who moved up.

Absurd? Maybe—until you consider the Peter Principle: in hierarchical organizations, people are promoted for performing well in their current job until they reach roles where they’re no longer competent. Many excellent individual contributors don’t make good managers; some average performers thrive as leaders. If that’s true, then “merit-based” promotion from one role to a very different one can degrade performance. In such settings, a degree of randomness can perform no worse—and sometimes better—than rigid, credential-driven advancement because it sidesteps some predictable misallocations.

3. What the Catania Group’s Research Shows

The Italian team of Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and colleagues explored these dynamics computationally:

• In a simulated 160-person firm, they compared three promotion strategies: promote by performance, promote entirely at random, and alternate between promoting strong and weak performers. The results ranked random ≈ alternating > performance-only, with pure performance-based promotion often worsening overall results.
• In later work (with Alessio Emanuele Biondo), they examined how randomness affects success more broadly. Their findings: luck exerts a large and persistent influence on who ends up at the top—even when skill differences exist.

These studies earned Ig Nobel Prizes (2010 and 2022), not because they’re jokes, but because they make us laugh and then think. The takeaway isn’t that skill is irrelevant; it’s that systems which assume skill alone determines outcomes can perform worse than systems that acknowledge uncertainty and noise.

4. The “Astronaut” Thought Experiment—and the Success Paradox

Imagine 1,000 astronaut candidates. Suppose the selection score is 95% ability and 5% luck. Even with only a 5% luck component, simulations show that those who make the very top cut almost always max out on luck. When you’re selecting from a large pool for extreme outcomes, small amounts of randomness dominate at the extremes.

Real life is full of those tiny luck factors: the timing of an application, a chance mentor, the manager who happens to like your project, a market cycle peaking when you launch. Sports shows an even more concrete example. In the NHL, more players are born in the early months of the year than later ones. The relative age effect means kids born just after the cutoff date are slightly bigger and stronger at early ages, get more coaching and playtime, and compound those advantages over time. Talent matters—but timing and context amplify or dampen it in ways that look, and often are, like luck.

What My Own Experience Taught Me

Three questions have guided my observations across school and work:

• Does strong ability reliably lead to success?
• Is “ability” ever purely one’s own?
• What exactly do we mean by success?

On the first, consider:

• Does a Seoul National University graduate always teach better than a teacher from a regional university?
• Why did selfie sticks flop 20 years ago but succeed a decade later, even when the core product was the same?
• If you have exceptional strength, does that alone make you rich?

On the second—how “pure” is ability? In elite schools, I met many capable people. I also met students who were, in truth, best described as products of intensive coaching and expensive preparation. Meanwhile, I knew classmates from my hometown who were brilliant but didn’t make it into top universities due to circumstance or misfit with the admissions machinery. The same holds at work. In one company I joined, a striking portion of hires came through connections—both visible and backchannel. If an open role required “100 units” of ability via the formal process, referrals could get in with “10.” Some were great; many were not. Entry into a “good” company isn’t always a proof of superior ability; sometimes it’s a reflection of network luck.

On the third—what is success? If your definition is high rank, a prestigious job, and lots of money, that’s your prerogative. But then you owe yourself an honest audit: How much of your success is uniquely yours? How much is timing, context, and help? Conversely, if you haven’t reached those markers, is that proof of personal failure—or evidence that outcomes reflect more than effort and talent?

A More Honest Story About Success

So, does ability produce success? Sometimes. But often:

• The path to “success” runs through gates shaped by privilege, timing, and randomness.
• Help from others—mentors, sponsors, friends—matters as much as personal effort.
• Systems that over-index on narrow credentials can misallocate talent.

None of this means give up. It means:

• Work hard, but stay humble. If you’ve done well, acknowledge that you’ve likely had good breaks along the way.
• Don’t let setbacks define you. A missed promotion or school acceptance may reflect noise rather than your worth.
• Define success for yourself. If success is a life well-lived—relationships, integrity, meaningful work—you may already be succeeding in ways the market can’t score.
• Design fairer systems. In organizations, consider promotion paths that test for the next job’s skills, not just the current job’s performance; try rotational roles or partial randomization where appropriate; widen hiring pipelines beyond elite credentials.

In short, be humble in the face of success and resist obsessing over “ability” as destiny. Talent matters—but luck, timing, and structure often decide who crosses the finish line first. Recognizing that truth doesn’t diminish effort; it restores dignity to those who try, invites gratitude from those who thrive, and pushes us to build systems where more people get a fair roll of the dice.

Selected references and examples mentioned by the author:

• Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit
• Peter Principle: random vs. performance-based promotions
• Mirai Industry’s reported “random promotion” practice
• Pluchino, Rapisarda, Garofalo (2010): “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study”
• Pluchino, Biondo, Rapisarda (2018): “Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure”
• Relative age effects in sports (e.g., NHL birth month distributions)
• Simulations and discussions of the “success paradox” (various public posts and code linked in the original)