What Determines Success: Luck or Hard Work?

Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant put it this way: “In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it. . . . I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.”

At the highest levels of competition, everyone has very high levels of ability and effort. At this elite level, what differentiates the very successful from the moderately successful is chance.