I should be so lucky
How can we estimate the importance of the role of luck on individual success?
Andrew Carnegie was an exceptionally lucky man. The fortune he amassed, adjusted for inflation, amounted to about $310 billion, give or take a few billions, putting him firmly in the top-5 of all time richest individuals. To accumulate such wealth in a lifetime is simply impossible through sheer hard work. He certainly did not start life in any sort of material wealth, born in a poor family in a Scottish industrial town, and growing up in a weaver’s cottage with one room serving as living, dining and sleeping quarters.
His biography on Wikipedia lists a sequence of events that all likely played a role in how his life panned out. Young Andrew was able to attend school — a school gifted to the town by a philanthropist. His uncle George Lauder was not just a significant intellectual influence on him, but also lent his parents the money with which they were to emigrate to America when he was twelve. Moving to America spelled the end of his formal education, and Andrew went to work changing spools in a cotton mill, when he caught the eye of, and was hired by John Hay, another Scottish émigré who owned of a factory producing spools for the cotton industry. A year later, he got a job as a messenger boy at the Ohio Telegraph Company, and within a year was…
