Delphic Maxim 68: Recognize fortune
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
68. Recognize fortune
There have been a number of moments when writing these posts that I’ve referred to one of my favourite writers, Nassim Taleb. He comes across in his writing as prickly and impatient, but I suppose that’s the way I would be if I constantly felt I needed to convince idiots about facts. One of the key ideas he comes back to time and again (often when attacking universities) is the way young entrepreneurs look to success stories and try to emulate people who have become breakout wealth-mongers.
The classic example of this genre is your Steve Jobs or Bill Gates (or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, for a more contemporary example). Surely if we all made the same smart choices and worked just as hard (or smart), we’d be as rich and successful as these guys? Taleb argues not necessarily: these people are black swans, and the process that got them to where they are isn’t attributable just to talent. They’re also very, very lucky. When we attribute success purely to hard work and talent, we often miss the fact that there are a thousand similar ventures that failed for not being in the right place at the right time. We are fooled by randomness into thinking that these titans got there on their own steam — as though they were destined to achieve what they did.
Fortune smiles on all of us in different ways, and most of the time it smiles very brightly on the most successful in our societies. Some people call this ‘privilege’, and I guess in a sense you could see it that way, but I think that’s a fairly loaded term these days. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call it something a little more anodyne: social reproduction. Bourdieu reckoned — pretty correctly — that people who occupy a particular social strata tend to reproduce the benefits and advantages of that strata for their children (or for other people who occupy a similar social space). If you’re born into a middle class family, you’re more likely to end up middle class than someone born into a working class family. Seems obvious, right? But the mechanisms that get you there are very interesting.
If you’re born into a middle class family, not only are you more likely to have access to books, music and a good diet than a working class family (simply because your family has more money to get those things), but you are more likely to feel comfortable in an environment like school. Schools are organised as fairly middle class institutions — so you get ahead by being used to that kind of place. If you’re born into wealth, you get even more advantages — social and cultural capital, Bourdieu called it — which might include family networks, time to visit museums and cultural sites with your family, perhaps private tuition.
None of this means that a working class kid can’t be successful, but it does mean that they’ve got to work harder to make up for all the structural disadvantages they face (lack of access to the same resources, not being familiar with the cultural codes of schooling, less books to read early on). And Bourdieu definitely wasn’t making a value judgement about social class — he was simply noting that it tends to reproduce itself. Life is, in a very real sense, the luck of the draw.
So you see that fortune plays an important role from the moment we are born. Advantages and disadvantages accrue to people just by chance — we deserve to be equal because we have this concept of ‘human rights’ that we’ve developed over years. But we aren’t born equal because our social structures create inequality (which we can — and should — rectify, but that’s an argument for another day).
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that we should recognise that fortune plays a strong role in determining our chances in life. Aspiring to be the next Steve Jobs is fine, but there’s no formula we can follow in order to do that. His success wasn’t just a matter of practicing zen and being a good sales person. He was fortunate to be adopted by American parents who lived in Silicon Valley just at the right time, and who gave him access to particular tools at a particular moment in history. He happened to meet Steve Wozniak. He was able to exploit fortune with his particular set of skills — most notably his sense of vision, of marketing, of product. But his success rests as much on chance as anyone else’s.
None of this is to discount effort and talent. Fortune may smile, but if you don’t work hard then you can’t exploit those opportunities. And ability is one of the few things we do have control over, so we need to work at it regardless. But at the same time, it’s important to recognise fortune — both for its role in gifting us the chances we have, for the need to support those who haven’t been graced in the same way, and not to be fooled by randomness. Success is a boon, right place, right time, right skills.
