"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.
Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.
My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.
The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.
What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.
Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?
I can see it being reasonable to assume the ROI of hard work while in shackles to be insufficient. Well, at least hard work that does not involve getting violent against the shacklers.
For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?
Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?
Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.
There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.
It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.
And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.
So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.