Study Finds Most Successful People Managed to Get the Best Return on Luck
A nine-year study found extremely successful entrepreneurs weren’t any luckier than those in a control group—but they did get the best “return on luck” or ROL.
Jim Collins and Morten Hansen summarized their findings in the New York Times. They found that “10Xers”—companies that outperformed their competitors by a factor of 10 at a certain point in time—managed to capitalize on lucky events and avoid catastrophic outcomes through “productive paranoia, combined with empirical creativity and fanatic discipline.”
They offer Bill Gates of Microsoft as an example. He grew up in a middle-class American family that enrolled him in a private school with a computer connection. He grew up as microelectronics made the personal computer possible. He and a friend saw a Popular Electronics article about a microcomputer kit. He went to college at Harvard, where he could test his computer ideas derived from the article.
But he wasn’t the only kid who grew up at the time with access to computing, and he wasn’t the only person who saw the Popular Electronics article. There were others with the education and expertise who could have done the same thing as Gates.
“The difference between Mr. Gates and similarly advantaged people is not luck,” write Collins and Hansen. “Getting a high ROL requires throwing yourself at the luck event with ferocious intensity, disrupting your life and not letting up. Bill Gates didn’t just get a lucky break and cash in his chips. He kept pushing, driving, working—and sustained that effort for more than two decades. That’s not luck—that’s return on luck.”
