Accepting that all actions involve probability laws (100% determinism excluded), skills might increase luck here defined as an achieved goal.

At another scale of analysis, luck will obviously influence skills, e.g. related to where/how/when you were born, or not?

Accepting that all actions involve probability laws (100% determinism excluded), skills might increase luck here defined as an achieved goal.

At another scale of analysis, luck will obviously influence skills, e.g. related to where/how/when you were born, or not?

First or all, I would like to be both lucky and skillfull. Being lucky can mean you are successful in life, but being skillful may mean you are successful in your work or profesion only. Thus, if I got the choice, I prefer to be lucky.

@Mahfuz, I agree with your point of view. it is obvious that the lack of only one of the two attributes may be reason of failure. However, I am not so claer-cut in distiguishing success in life and success in work. Both are successes, i. e. good results and fulfillment of expectations. I believe that to be successful in work means also to be successful in life and vice versa.The difference between the two sides seems very thin to me.

You might be successful/lucky in your private life, but not in your professional life, and vice versa, or not? What is true private life for very hard working so-called successful people?    

Dear Marcel, Mahfuz, and Ierardi Thank you all for your comments.

"A cat won their year-long stock selection contest against investment professionals and students last year", U.K. Guardian reported. While the professionals used their decades of investment knowledge and traditional stock-picking methods, the cat selected stocks by throwing his favorite toy mouse on a grid of numbers allocated to different companies.

The stock contest illustrates the fact that many activities generate outcomes that are a function of both skill and luck. Yet, I always say to myself that "luck come and goes, but if I got skills I am always prepared."

Indeed, it is important to be both. Often, people have some great skills, but they do not get noticed. Sometime, they are lucky when someone notices such a person, and help him to get to the highest level of success or stardom. But the question does not give a choice to choose "both". If so, I would like to be skillful whether someone notices me or not. I am of firm view that, it would  give me self satisfaction  when I use those skills for doing something that makes me happy and gives me a sense of meaningfulness. Luck will not have much meaning then, especially in academic excellence.

Dear Debi thank you for your wise comments. I think both are needed in stock investments, some sports (various degrees), and even for indulging in a Q&A in RG,.

Being lucky is not enough. You should learn to recognize opportunities  and seize them when they arise.

Luck can be good or bad whereas skill has a much better chance of shining through.

Dear Mahfuz. Opportunism or "opportunistic behavior"  is the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances  A better way  is to create or identify opportunities and motivate others in the right path..

P.S.: Opportunism is an important concept in such fields of study as biology, transaction cost economics, game theory, ethics, psychology, sociology and politics.

In my opinion, it is more important to be skillful than to be lucky "if luck applies". A skill is acquired by an effort & it has the characteristic of becoming permanent "once you need it, it is there". Luck may come & may not come and hence it is unreliable. I have never counted upon luck to proceed in my life. In the cause - effect equation, when you study hard then you hope to get excellent results but you cannot depend on luck for this aim.

I tested luck scientifically: there was a 10 years old girl roaming near to the class in which I was giving a multiple choice exam in chemistry to freshman students. I asked her what she was doing & she replied that she was waiting for her sister "so & so" inside. I told her to sit down, gave her an exam paper, and told her to encircle the correct answer… If she was lucky, then there would be a gift for her. She got 25/100 & lost the gift. I repeated the experiment some time later in another exam & the result was close to 25/100.

Since then, I stopped writing at the end of any exam "Good Luck" & instead I write "Best Wishes"!

Dear Dr. Nizar. Thank you for your comments. My question is about the skill vs. luck and their implications for investors. Skill and luck are very important in the world of investing. There is an idea called the paradox of skill. It claims as people become better at an activity, the difference between the best and the average and the best and the worst becomes much narrower. As people become more skillful, luck becomes more important. That's precisely what happens in the world of investing.

Best Wishes!

Mahmoud

With all due respect for all sophisticated replies by scholars, I think both are vital but skill is an indispensable part, and these two factors have be accompanied by other effective and efficient aspects as well, such as perseverance, endeavor etc. 

Dear All,

I would wholly agree with Marcel. Under normal and just circumstances his comment should be the rule. However, there are some who are skilled how to be "lucky". It seems to me that being skilled in science cannot be as advantageous as being skilled in organising luck to build a career.

Using a commonplace: luck has been and will be an important part in success.

Surely, hard-working, noble person must be lucky.But to live in the society and to be free from society is impossible. I researched the correlation between the level of reflection and other criteria, including success. The more reflection- the more empathy, tolerance, communicative skills etc. Such sort of persons often were not successfully socialized. May be, on the contrary,we should bring up the skill to traverse, conform, lie, extricate, try to keep a low profile mediocrity so that they can be lucky.To develop their "grasp reflect"is more useful for life. Nowadays we are working on the theme "my beliefs" and a lot of students named the art to adopt as preference, very few believe in award for efforts.    

Since probability is brought in the answers, let me give an analogy, I think the following link gives a standard academic argument about how an investor skill is analogous to coin flipping: Take a large number of people (say, 1024) and put them all in a (big) room together, each armed with a coin to flip. Start them all flipping their coins together on command. At the end of round one, 512 of them will have flipped heads. At the end of round two, 256 will have flipped two heads in a row. At the end of round three, 128 will have flipped three heads in a row….At the end of round ten, 1 lucky individual will have flipped ten heads in a row.

Is he a coin-flipping genius? No. He’s just been lucky. He’s the one in a thousand twenty-four that the laws of chance predict there will be.

Conclusion: that’s all the “skill” of apparently successful investment professionals is–dumb luck, plus their clients’ lack of knowledge of basic facts about probability.

http://practicalstockinvesting.com/2010/09/05/portfolio-manager-skill-is-coin-flipping-a-good-analogy/

I think skill is more important than luck, do your homework and cross your fingers.

Dear Ahmad, Thank you for your comment. It has both skill and luck elements in it. Because, by saying "cross your fingers": is the same as " to keep one's fingers crossed' means to put one finger across another to ward off bad luck". So it means "good luck, hope or wish"  or "hope for the best"

Of course  there are two version: If you cross them in front of you it means that you're hoping the thing you are thinking about or talking about is going to happen.  The second is if you cross your fingers behind your back. That means you're promising to do something but have no intention of doing it. 

Dear Mahmoud,

I would prefer to do the first version, to cross my finger in front of my body, which means that I hope the thing I am thinking or talking about is going to happen. I never did the second version of crossing my fingers behind my back. 

Dear Mahfuz. That should be the case. The custom of crossing your fingers for good luck is fairly common. The second version is sometime used by kids  For example;

Mother: "did you finish all of your homework?"

Child (with fingers crossed) "yes, I promise I did it all"

In this example the child did not complete his homework, but feels that by crossing his fingers it is OK to lie.

I will prefer to be skilful as it will remain permanently with us. Where as luck is not all the time be with everyone. You may be lucky some time and some time not.  Thanks

Dear Sarwan,

I still prefer to be lucky more than to be skillfull. If I am skifful without luck, it can happen that I find a unsecured job or with less salary. The problem with being lucky that, as you said, luck is not all the time be with everyone.

From the answers so far it looks having both is a gift!  we can then claim "Luck and Skill are two sides of the same coin."

Luck appears to be a chance that happens randomly so, can not to be taken as a real success. By competently utilizing the opportunities, time and one’s skill one can achieve the real success. No one can sustain the position, name and fame got by luck or chance or excel in his/her field, if he/she lacks in necessary skill. It is said Luck or God help those who help themselves. Thus, luck favours only when competence is there.

Dear Mahmoud, on the lighter side: 

“The Dictionary Is the Only Place Where Success Comes Before Work” (Attributed to several authors, including Mark Twain and Vince Lombardi)

Thomas Edison: "Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."

Albert Einstein: “If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”

The last does not fully apply in Education (probably y and z should be null).

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/10/20/dict/

https://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Albert_Einstein

Dear Antonio. Thank you for writing to us these quotes. I guess Edison equation, 

Genius = 1% inspiration + 99% perspiration,

was to encourage everyone regardless of their ability, i.e., the importance of hardwork and determination when it comes to educating oneself.

Dear Kamal thank you for a short but great sentence. One place I can think of good luck is better than skill is if I was a pilot! "I'd rather be lucky than good"..

What about reading Some Thomas Edison quotes:

 “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.”

“If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.”

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.”

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3091287.Thomas_A_Edison

Thank you António for Thomas Edison quotes. Although it is not related to present question I should say no one can imagine life without Edison's inventions and discoveries. We would not have anything such as light bulb, laptop, car, and any electronic machines. He really had the skills and good imagination (including a bit of luck).

Dear Francesca. Thank you for your contribution. Much of the good and bad fortune (luck) we encounter is a result of our thoughts and behavior. I could not follow you exactly how Abilities, Capabilities, EgoCentrism, Humility, etc has to do with luck and skill. I found a short article about "The Luck Factor"  by Richard Wiseman and how it is different from "superstition".   Lets face it lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prohesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

The article is attached, you can read it for more information about luck, superstition, skepticism, .... .

Dear Irina,

Your description is accurate, clear and true. Society does not like anybody or anything stepping over the limits of mediocrity and average. This is the tragedy of social development and behaviour.

The two

I saw an interview by Michael Mauboussin, the witter of “The Success Equation”  book in the famous Forbes site. It is about "The Role of Luck and Skill In Investing".  The interview is 5 page long but worth reading. I am including the link to it  here for those want to pursue the issue..

http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2013/11/05/the-role-of-luck-and-skill-in-investing/

Dear Francesca I only add the link from Forbes site:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/investo...ole-of-luck-and-skill-in-investing/

If you insert the above link it direct you to the article. So the picture is generated automatically by the site and I did not insert it. Anyway,  the mentioned link is about "The Role of Luck and Skill In Investing" as I said before and has nothing to do with Gambling, Chess, Sport, etc. 

Returning to your question: "May I ask where does, let's say, humanitarian Skills or ... Luck [?!] lay?"  Luck is just another word for chance taken personally. For example, It's obvious that the chances of a normal two-sided coin coming down heads, rather than tails, are exactly 50/50 for each throw. Another example, classical mechanics does not allow chance, and quantum mechanics relies solely on it.

Considering views of all the respondents, both competence and luck are important for a successful personal and professional life. However, I would insist that ultimately luck favours the capable persons. Hence, one should have greater reliance on one’s competence and shave have faith in divine righteousness.

Dear Mahmoud: Easy money and financial speculation is not the solution for the present and for the future generations.

I agree with Thomas Edison. You can be what you want, you just have to believe, work hard on that, and do not give up. I give a well-known example in the field of fortune: Ronaldo said recently that he believes that he is the best player of football of the world (and even if he is not, that he has to believe that he is), and thus he works everyday very, very much for achieve that goal. Hard work and rationality, that is competence, are the keywords. Some amazing examples could also be given by observing other odd personalities. Good examples of work and tenacity like these and many others are important, particularly for the future generations.

Dear António Do you think Ronaldo could achieved all these fame without a touch of luck? Whether or not you believe in luck, there's something to be said for being in the right place at the right time. There are many football player around the globe and work as hard as Ronaldo yet he and Messi attracted us more. Why? I think they were very lucky to be picked up by Real Madrid and Barcelona, otherwise they were still ordinary players like the rest. Remember your last quote from Edison about what make people genius. Both factors are important but I too like you believe we should put more weight on hardworks than luck.. 

Good point Francesca. It raises another question: is it more important to enjoy success at young age along the whole life or at the end of the life, after a long period of troubles, but with a permanent glory?

Dear  Ierardi. Good question. I would like to give it a try to answer your question about the best time a failure or a success should occur in our life by two quotes (without further comments) :

Anne Baxter “It’s best to have failure happen early in life. It wakes up the Phoenix bird in you so you rise from the ashes.”

Amos Bronson Alcott “Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.”

Dear Ierardi, to Nodve Sh., "A life of good people is eternal youth". I'm sure, that success must be appreciated (it must be supported). The good addition to a good head is a good banknote.But to hope is human. To G.Flaubert, "You may become happy even the day before the death".  

Dear Mahmoud: There are many (many) excellent football players and many (many) excellent workers and good people around the world. For many poor people, the football is a hope of live (probably many people do not know the history of Ronaldo). Unfortunately, the life of a football player is very short. Probably you do not know the culture of the football that is joining people. It is due to the competence of many (many) hard worker people that we have the current pattern of life, and particularly so excellent football matches (they, and specially they, are all the best of the world).

Dear Antonio, You said "Probably you do not know the culture of the football that is joining people." Actually I was a serious football player till the end of my high-school. I follow four of the European leagues (La Liga, Premier League, Bundesliga, Serie A ) even now.  

Still I think being in the right place at the right time (or be lucky) is important in sports in general and football in particular.. Please see the picture I made available in my question it shows the level of the skill and luck involved in different sports.

Dear Kamal, If you read my previous answer (two answers back) I said: "Both factors are important but I too like you believe we should put more weight on hardworks than luck."  Yet the present question started around the studies and  research findings based on the analysis of historical data by Michael Mauboussin author of “The Success Equation” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). The picture is also from his book.   

Dear @Mahmoud, Being skillful means that you are lucky all the time, while being lucky happens only one time.

in science , skills competencies  and hard work are more objective features for success, however the parameter luck is determinant for achieving ones objectives: like be lucky or unlucky to work in a good or not laboratory, to belong to a developed or not country, to be from a rich, poor or middle class family, to be with good or not health... the equation of success needs the two, the percentage of each is dependent from the professional, social and political 'country' behavior.

To be skillfull, you can earn your living. But to be lucky, you may be wealthy. I believe that what happens.

Dear Francesca Cansani 

the person you are describing is a fortunate person, if die he will never regret and will die happily, and his good deeds will never die....

The following article appeared in  "The Wall Street Journal" by Dow Jones & Company, is about "Was Benjamin Graham Skillful or Lucky?" may bring the question and responses back again to the right track (to where we left).

Benjamin Graham is universally regarded as one of the best investors of the 20th century. We tend to think of the greatest investors – say, Peter Lynch, George Soros, John Templeton, Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham – as being mostly or entirely skillful. Graham outperformed the stock market by an annual average of at least 2.5 percentage points for more than two decades, he coyly admitted that much of his remarkable track record may have been due to luck. So, the next time you find a fund manager boasting about how skillful he is at picking investments, remember that the great Benjamin Graham credited much of his own phenomenal success to luck alone.

A conclusion that may be drawn from this story is simple: “Chance favors the prepared mind”. At the very least, the idea of luck being better than smarts can serve as an antidote to that enemy of success that is hubris.

http://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/12/13/was-benjamin-graham-skillful-or-lucky/

I believe in luck, But to be skillful is more important. 

Dear Shafig,

Thank you for your answer. To add a comment to what you said, here I quote Jean Cocteau: "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like."  

Nice observation Francesca. But as far as I remember few artists, poets and writers  skills are recognized only after their death (in good sense). 

Luck is a crossroad where talent and skill and opportunity meet. Everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself and to succeed in life. Life gives up those who lack the desire, initiative and will to fight for a better life, and does not help those who leave their lives to luck, destiny or fate.

dear Francesca. Success requires smart moves too, which isn't the same as working hard. Hence, in order to have a great success you need a little more talent and a lot of luck!

You need to be skillful to have a chance to be lucky, i.e. make your homework first and then expect a bit of luck to make things happen.

Dear Patrice, Thank you for your answer. do you thing a big difference between successful and lucky people? I guess NO, as most lucky people are successful. when we feel lucky, we feel happy and satisfied, too. So, one can model luck as:     LUCK = HAPPINESS + SATISFACTION

Another look at the luck-skill relation. What create luck in our life? Skills, thoughts and behavior. So we can deduce that  creating luck is a skill that one must learn. What is your point of view?

Dear Francesca: Thank you for sharing your meaning of life with us. We are all believers and have trust and faith in God  Think luck this way: Luck too is part of God's way of saying I am here with you, so dont worry (or not to fear).

Dear  Francesca I  think I answered you previously "creating luck is a skill that one must learn" But the answer provided by @Kamal is a very good too.

As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” So, Dear Francesca, be ready when opportunity comes....

Dear Francesca,

I forgot to add the following quote by Howard Schultz on the misunderstanding about lucky and unlucky in my last post : “I believe life is a series of near misses. A lot of what we ascribe to luck is not luck at all. It’s seizing the day and accepting responsibility for your future. It’s seeing what other people don’t see and pursuing that vision.” 

For me to be skillfully, and it would be more better to be skillful and lucky at the same time.

Dear Shafig, Thank you. However, in most domains of life (sport, business, ...), skill and luck seem hopelessly entangled. According to the random theory (randomness and random walk models) the more skillful the players playing the game (soccer or any other sport), the higher the chance that luck comes into play. This theory supports the notion that you have to be skillfully lucky to play in the big leagues of sports or business.   Finally, luck affects the skilled as well as the unskilled; the former know how to maximize their good luck and minimize or avoid the bad.

Thank you dear Kamal. Your tread was asking about what enables some researchers to have successful careers whilst others face repeated failure. I read some of the answers there and did not get my answer there. Anyway, here I was (am) interested in  finding the roles of luck, skill and their combination in business, sports and investing.

Dear Kamal yes yu are right, they are related. Further more I think both skill and luck play roles in the success of scientists too. For example, there is a popular story that Newton was sitting under an apple tree, an apple fell on his head, and he suddenly thought of the Universal Law of Gravitation. Was he lucky?Could you imagine (IF the story is true!) and instead of apple an big heavy iron fell on his head would we have  Universal Law of Gravitation now. So he was lucky too.

Another analogy between Luck and Skill with conservatives and liberals parties was discussed by R.H. Frank in The New York Times newspaper.

There may be no topic that more reliably divides liberals and conservatives than the relationship between success and luck. Many conservatives celebrate market success as an almost inevitable consequence of talent and effort. Liberals, by contrast, like to remind us that even talented people who work hard sometimes fall on hard times through no fault of their own.

conservatives ---> in favor of Skill 

liberals ---> in favor of Luck

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/business/of-luck-and-success-economic-view.html?_r=0

Thanks for the link of your related thread, Dear Kamal. I appreciated very much the answer of Marwan to your question there (particularly due to the scientific criticism subjacent).

Some big trees give many little fruits; while some other little plants give fruits very big (so when I am under a tree and one fruit fall, I do not mind to have luck).

Dear Antonio. Very good observation. If you don't mind to have luck in this situation then what would you do if no fruit ever falls? You must use your skill, i.e., claim the tree to get it. So either way (be lucky or be skillful) you will eventually get the fruit. I wondered which way is easier! 

Dear Francesca what you are trying to say is skill and luck alone are not enough but they should be in the hands of righteous  people. Let me quote from Martin Luther who once said “People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.”

The following answer was given to a similar question "Which is more important for success: skill, effort or luck?"

Will is the most important thing. Will makes you learn skills, it drives you to make efforts. Luck is bendable by skills or efforts or both or will.

http://www.quora.com/Which-is-more-important-for-success-skill-effort-or-luck#

Thank you dear Kamal. As you said "will" and "hard work" have same meaning here.  We have a Persian proverb which roughly means "work hard and trust God to take care of the rest" or "if you work hard, may you be blessed by God"

P.S. In persian we say "از شما حرکت از خدا برکت" Do you have same proverb in Arabic?

Sometimes luck may be beneficial (as the picture compare chess game vs. gambling). Of course we are interested in the former game (chess).

This is another interesting finding in a research article. Alvarez and Schmidt (2006) found that luck is more important than technical efficiency in explaining fish catches.

Antonio Alvarez and Peter Schmidt (2006). Is skill more important than luck in explaining fish catches? Journal of Productivity Analysis, Vol 26, No 1, pp 15-25. DOI: 10.1007/s11123-006-0002-x