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In NeverRick Astley’s recent autobiography, the ’80s pop star describes how looking back over several decades has given him a new appreciation for a critical factor in his success. “You see how much luck and chance are involved in your life and career,” he writes in the prologue. “You can have drive and ambition and talent, but there’s also a huge amount of luck: you know, someone wrote a three-and-a-half minute pop song in 1987, and my life completely changed. changed because of this. . It’s really ridiculous.

This particularly resonated. Not just because I’ve always admired Astley for looking normal in a volatile industry (although Never shows it was more complicated than that). But also because the perspective of age makes us appreciate the apparently arbitrary nature of success. When I look at my peers who have achieved career success, for some it was always inevitable: they fought harder or their talent was unquestionable. But to others, it seems like chance.

I remembered Astley after cutting a radio interview with an author – who shall remain anonymous – the other day. The account of the forces that shaped their writing was quite enjoyable, telling a tale of a house full of books and parents who nurtured their love of stories.

It was the omission that was my flashpoint. The author has left aside the immense good fortune of having access to a vast family financial cushion which allows him to gain time to write in a climate where writers’ incomes are more precarious than ever. It is not a question of neglecting their talent as writers but of placing it alongside their great fortune. We are not good at talking about such luck because it does not fit our obsession with effort and talent. Attributing every success to chance alone would make us all retreat to our beds – which isn’t really what motivational posters are about.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, organizational psychologist and author of Why do so many incompetent men become leaders?estimates that luck accounts for 55 percent of success “if we define it as anything that is neither talent nor effort.” This includes the “lottery of life”, such as money, place of birth and your parents.

We’re not good at talking about luck. This does not correspond to our obsession with effort and talent

In a 2016 paper, researchers Chengwei Liu and Mark de Rond considered luck to play such an important role that they mischievously suggested imitating the method of lotocracy used during the ancient Greek and Venetian republics and selecting rulers from company at random, because “there can only be company directors”. small differences in skills between the stars of the company. One effect, they say, would be to reduce income inequality, because we would no longer need to reward arbitrarily chosen leaders so much.

Recognizing the role of luck minimizes our own particularity. Sam Friedman, co-author of Born to Rule: the creation and remaking of the British elitetold me that his interlocutors at the top of politics, business, cultural institutions and the liberal professions placed talent before luck to explain their success. In interviews, many used it as “a refrain, a linguistic way to distance themselves from the suggestion of intentional or strategic career development behavior.” Instead, luck often seemed to be used as a way of defining a person’s success as arising from spontaneous or coincidental external recognition rather than calculated intention – “I was lucky enough to be recognized by x” or “I was lucky to have an opportunity”. Rather than being integral to their success, luck seemed to Friedman to serve as a distraction from “charges of power-seeking and hubris.”

Part of the reason we diminish the importance of luck is also that it doesn’t always seem lucky. Sometimes it seems normal: having a good chance of being born in a stable society, of being healthy and well nourished.

Or it can be complicated. One of the biggest interruptions in my career was the death of my father. At the time it was completely miserable. But a later inheritance allowed me to lower my mortgage and allow myself to freelance for a few years, trying out different topics: a socialite, a hip-hop mogul, and an interview with a white witch about her scary advice for family harmony during the period. Christmas time. (A dish fusing garlic and butter with a baguette, she suggested mysteriously. Garlic bread, in other words.)

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

The problem with downplaying the role of luck is that it underestimates the likelihood that it could go the other way. The truth is that effort or talent cannot make you completely immune to unhappiness. Divorce, illness, layoffs happen to the best of us. As Astley told me on the phone, the difference between success and failure is a knife’s edge.

Emma Jacobs is the FT’s work and careers editor

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