In his blog, James very nicely articulates that in the long run, hard work clearly wins over the luck. That has to be true otherwise there would be no motivation whatsoever to do something. I would like to quote his line:
As a general rule, the wilder the success, the more extreme and unlikely the circumstances that caused it.
There are always 2 things that define the distribution. Mean and Variance. Mean is something from which we can meaningfully infer about the laws. Variance is inherently unexplainable. And hence we can build a correspondence.
Mean can be equated to Law and Variance to the Luck!
As we always require these 2 parameters to define or to talk about any distribution, similarly, we always require some law (set of qualities, flow, etc) along with a luck (wildly random) to explain or talk about any phenomenon. And by the way, we call this a Normal Distribution. In a sense, law and luck both are components of a Norm.
As I always wonder about different components of fondness inherent in us. Fondness about success, a fondness about leader, fondness about finding patterns. There is one more component, that is to generalise any individual eureka moment. If you discover some theory that explains (locally) all your experiences meaningfully, you just get “sold” to that theory as if it is very general and applies everywhere. You then “sell” your theory (your local eureka effect) to the entire world! I am always amused at many self proclaimed management gurus, management consulting firms, always coming up with some paper (napkin), draw some circles, squares, and weird shapes to “elaborate” their eureka effect (theory, model)! By the time world discovers the meaninglessness inherent in their paper by applying their “revelations”, they (consultants) had made a huge profit out of it already. Anyway. It’s another fondness to get attracted to Consultants! Fondness doesn’t just wish to stop. Isn’t it?
However, I feel, life is much more complex to decipher than we can ever think of. We should get rid of this fondness to “explain” every phenomenon in this world as if you have the explanation.
It is because variance, that we have diversity. And as said by my the most favourite saint poet Jnaneshwar mauli, diversity further strengthens the unity as it always “points” towards that Unity. Diversity brings the enjoyment, makes life interesting. There is lot to learn from surprises than plane laws. As we arguably say that outliers store the most critical information. This Variance is nothing but just another part of Completeness!
I have literally a list of Fondness components which always wonder me. Here is just one more. Reductionists! Fondness to reduce everything to something! For example, “Neti Neti”, “Aham Brahmasmi”, etc.
So for reductionists, going by Hegel’s term “Aufhebung”, we can say that two different connotations (words) Luck and Law are preserved and changed through sublation in the word “Grace”! This is my best try! Because I can see nothing else!
Reinvent The Self! 