This evening (28th August 2020), popular YouTuber educator Veritasium (Derek Muller) asked the question of whether success is a result of hard work or luck.
During the video (link below) he discusses how in January of this year, NASA selected 11 new astronauts from 18,300 applicants to join their corps.
He wanted to know how much of a factor luck was for the 11 successful candidates, so he programmed a simplistic ‘toy model’ to see what would be the result if each candidate were given a score for their skill and experience (hard work), and a second score for their luck. Each candidates’ total score would then be made up of 95% of ‘hard work’ and just 5% of ‘luck’.
Link to the video: youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I (astronaut part starts at 3m38s)
I recreated this model with Excel. There are 18,300 candidates each given a unique ID number between 1 and 18,300. Each candidate is randomly given a Skill score between 0 and 1 and a Luck score between 0 and 1. A total score is then generated with the formula:
0.95*Skill + 0.05*Luck
A screenshot of one run through of this simulation is shown below.
The table on the left is sorted on descending TotalScore; the top 11 scoring candidates are those selected to be astronauts. The right column of that table shows the Skill ranking of the candidates.
Note that the most skillful / suitable candidate is not even in the top 25 candidates when luck is taken into account. The table on the right shows a sorted list of the 11 most skillful candidates. The #1 most skillful candidate came in 91st place overall because he or she was only 55.11% lucky.
The average luck score for the 11 successful candidates was a whopping 96.12%, and all 11 scored in excess of 90% for luck. However, the successful candidates only rated 53/18,300 for skill (which still means an amazing skill score….but not the best!).
I ran the simulation multiple times and the results were always very similar. In order to be selected by NASA you need to be a very very good candidate, but some luck really helps.