Optimizing Luck

Each week on the NPR podcast How I Built This, host Guy Raz interviews a founder of a successful enterprise like James Dyson or Ben and Jerry. At the end of most segments, he'll ask the founder how much of their success do they attribute to luck and how much to talent. In most cases, the founder will modestly say that luck played a major role but some will add that they did take advantage of the luck when it came. One common thread for these successful people is that they are extremely resilient and aren't afraid to try something new when things don't work at first.

There are two ways to look at this. On the one hand there is certainly some selection bias. For each one of these success stories there are probably hundreds of others who were equally persistent and worked equally hard but did not achieve the same success. It is like the infamous con where you send 1024 people a two outcome prediction about a stock. The prediction will be correct in 512 of them so the next week you send those people another prediction and so on. After 10 weeks, one person will have received the correct prediction 10 times in a row and will think you are infallible. You then charge them a King's ransom for the next one.

Yet, it may be possible to optimize luck and you can see this with Jensen's inequality. Suppose

represents some combination of your strategy and effort level and is your outcome function. Jensen's inequality states that the average or expectation value of a convex function (e.g. a function that bends upwards) is greater than (or equal to) the function of the expectation value. Thus, . In other words, if your outcome function is convex then your average outcome will be larger just by acting in a random fashion. During "convex" times, the people who just keep trying different things will invariably be more successful than those who do nothing. They were lucky (or they recognized) that their outcome was convex but their persistence and willingness to try anything was instrumental in their success. The flip side is that if they were in a nonconvex era, their random actions would have led to a much worse outcome. So, do you feel lucky?