How much of our fate is determined by luck

We often become frozen in our decision-making, feeling like the choice is out of our hands or part of some bigger plan that we aren't the director of. Here are a few scenarios where many of us have likely felt stuck from making the decisions that could determine our destiny, and some suggestions on how to choose differently:.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live in a new city, or even a new country? But sometimes you need to be brave enough to go. Yes it can be scary, and yes it takes time to adjust, but a year into the move you will likely feel as at home there as you do here. So why not shift your destiny in that new direction if that's what you want? What about love? Many people have walked away from someone that might have been "the one" for various reasons.

Maybe you met the girl or guy of your dreams but weren't able to commit and lost out. That's destiny slipping through your fingers. Fate can only do so much Other people might be stuck in a bad relationship where they're unhappy but feel it's "meant to be" that they stay together. I read this great quote that said "many people are in relationships that are over, but haven't ended.

If you don't have the love you want in your life, you need to take action to find it. Put yourself out there, be open to new possibilities and actively seek your own destiny! It can be hard to think of our destiny as being separate from our fate if we become accustomed to letting it lead our path. A lot of people look at life with a "que sera sera" what will be, will be attitude but if you think about it as something you have control over, you can make deliberate actions to create your desired destiny.

This means being true to yourself and not being passive or only following other people's opinions. You may not get what you want in life, but you will always get what you choose.

What will you choose to do with your fate when it comes knocking? Fate is constantly bringing you opportunities; you just have to be conscious enough to see them. You have to act or nothing will change.

You may be using your free will to force an outcome that is not right for you. Walk away. Her website is ethereal-wellness. We get it: you like to have control of your own internet experience. But advertising revenue helps support our journalism. To read our full stories, please turn off your ad blocker.

We'd really appreciate it. Click the AdBlock button on your browser and select Don't run on pages on this domain. Thanks for signing up! If this were even a little bit true, then this would have some significant implications for how we distribute limited resources, and for the potential for the rich and successful to actually benefit society versus benefiting themselves by getting even more rich and successful. In an attempt to shed light on this heavy issue, the Italian physicists Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Raspisarda teamed up with the Italian economist Alessio Biondo to make the first ever attempt to quantify the role of luck and talent in successful careers.

In their prior work, they warned against a "naive meritocracy", in which people actually fail to give honors and rewards to the most competent people because of their underestimation of the role of randomness among the determinants of success.

To formally capture this phenomenon, they proposed a " toy mathematical model " that simulated the evolution of careers of a collective population over a worklife of 40 years from age The Italian researchers stuck a large number of hypothetical individuals "agents" with different degrees of "talent" into a square world and let their lives unfold over the course of their entire worklife. They defined talent as whatever set of personal characteristics allow a person to exploit lucky opportunities I've argued elsewhere that this is a reasonable definition of talent.

Talent can include traits such as intelligence, skill, motivation, determination, creative thinking, emotional intelligence, etc. The key is that more talented people are going to be more likely to get the most 'bang for their buck' out of a given opportunity see here for support of this assumption.

All agents began the simulation with the same level of success 10 "units". Every 6 months, individuals were exposed to a certain number of lucky events in green and a certain amount of unlucky events in red. Whenever a person encountered an unlucky event, their success was reduced in half, and whenever a person encountered a lucky event, their success doubled proportional to their talent to reflect the real-world interaction between talent and opportunity.

What did they find? In the final outcome of the year simulation, while talent was normally distributed, success was not. This is consistent with real-world data, although there is some suggestion that in the real world, wealth success is even more unevenly distributed, with just eight men owning the same wealth as the poorest half of the world.

So what did the simulation find? On the one hand, talent wasn't irrelevant to success. In general, those with greater talent had a higher probability of increasing their success by exploiting the possibilities offered by luck. Also, the most successful agents were mostly at least average in talent.

So talent mattered. However, talent was definitely not sufficient because the most talented individuals were rarely the most successful. In general, mediocre-but-lucky people were much more successful than more-talented-but-unlucky individuals.

The most successful agents tended to be those who were only slightly above average in talent but with a lot of luck in their lives. Consider the evolution of success for the most successful person and the least successful person in one of their simulations:. As you can see, the highly successful person in green had a series of very lucky events in their life, whereas the least successful person in red who was even more talented than the other person had an unbearable number of unlucky events in their life.

As the authors note, "even a great talent becomes useless against the fury of misfortune. Talent loss is obviously unfortunate, to both the individual and to society. So what can be done so that those most capable of capitalizing on their opportunities are given the opportunities they most need to thrive? Let's turn to that next. Many meritocratic strategies used to assign honors, funds, or rewards are often based on the past success of the person.

Selecting individuals in this way creates a state of affairs in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer often referred to as the " Matthew effect ". But is this the most effective strategy for maximizing potential?

Which is a more effective funding strategy for maximizing impact to the world: giving large grants to a few previously successful applicants, or a number of smaller grants to many average-successful people? This is a fundamental question about distribution of resources, which needs to be informed by actual data.

Consider a study conducted by Jean-Michel Fortin and David Currie, who looked at whether larger grants lead to larger discoveries.