Which One is More Important? Luck or Hard Work?

txq01001

Which One is More Important? Luck or Hard Work?
Published by Ori Sonata
January 23, 2010, Category: Mathematics
Being successful is the dream of every person living in this world. Some people say that success is a matter of luck. The other say that success is a result of hard work. This article explains how luck, hard work and success are related in mathematically simple way.
  
Everyone in this world want to become a successful person. The motivation for becoming a successful person may vary from people to people. Some people want fame, the other want to gain a lot of money, some other want to make this world a better place. Regardless of what motivate people to success the fact is still the same. Everyone want to become a successful person.
Different people have different theory about what matter the most for people to success. Some people think that having luck is important. Some people think that success is a result of hard work. The more compromising type often end up saying that success is X percent luck and Y percent hard work. Without doing any mathematics analysis however, we will never know how much X and Y actually are.

Read more in Mathematics
« Importance, Application of Roman Numerals and Their Enumeration of One to 2000
How to Read Numbers in Binary »
Before doing any kind of mathematics analysis, we have to define what Luck and Hard Work actually are. To get a mathematically workable definition of both we should ask, “why people who think luck is more important think so? And why people who think hard work is more important think so?”.
People who say that luck is important usually agree with the notion that given the same amount of hard work, someone with better luck accomplish something more easily compared to someone born with less luck. Therefore we can conclude that luck is the probability to earn success for each attempt to earn it.

Since Luck is a probability, then the value of Luck for anyone should be between 0 and 1.
Now, we have to work out a mathematically workable definition of hard work to complete the model. People who work hard are usually noted by their repeating attempt to earn the kind of success they want. They do and try more things to get what they want. This means that the people hardworkness could be measured by how many times they attempt to gain success per unit time.

We often heard from the success stories of various people that they failed many times before they eventually get an opportunity that bring them success. Therefore, it is safe to assume that to become a successful person, someone only have to success in at least one of their many attempts. Thus your probability of success could be determined by the following formula:


For example lets assume that the value of your Luck is 0.3 (30%). This means that if you only take one attempt to gain your success, your probability of success is 30%. If you try again the second time, you have another 30% probability of success. Now to become a successful person you only need to success at least one, this means that your probability of success by trying twice is P(success) = ( 1 – ( 1 – 0.3 ) ^2 ) = 1 – 0.7^2 = 1 – 0.49  = 0.51 (51%). If you try three times, your probability of success is 65.7%. If you try four times, your probability of success is 76%. If you try for 15 times, your probability of success is 99.52%. It is clear that more you try, the higher your probability of success become.