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Ben Carlson’s column today is titled “The Ovarian Lottery”. Where and when you were born has a whole lot to do with how your life turns out. You could be capable of becoming a great artist, but if you were born female for most of human history you wouldn’t be able to reach your potential. Born a serf in medieval Europe? You were going to stay a serf. Sure, hard work helps, but if your particular talent isn’t in demand, it only helps so much. Just ask the North Carolina furniture and textile workers laid off after NAFTA.
He also has a quote from Nick Maggiulli: “If you had invested from 1960-1980 and beaten the market by 5% each year, you would have made less money than if you had invested from 1980-2000 and underperformed the market by 5% a year. Sometimes, when you start investing can be more important than anything else”. When you start drawing down also matters, of course.
I got lucky: I was born to a middle class family in England right after WWII. That meant adequate food, excellent (free) education and good (free) medical care, plus getting into the tech business when it was just taking off. Being born in, say, North Korea at the same time would have been a very different story.
Interesting you mention North Korea. My father in-law (97) along with hisb11 siblings were all born in North Korea. After war broke out in 1950 they fled south. In the mid to late 70’s they immigrated to the US (Hawaii to be exact), and all have had a very good life since. I’ve been married (happily), to my bride (who was born in South Korea) for 39 years.
Totally agree. So many factors go into having a happy and healthy life. Having good luck definitely help, sometime a lot. We still control how we respond to what get thrown to our life.
Thank you, Ms. Wilhelm, for this article. I am heartened by it because my conviction is that understanding the role of luck, i.e., fate, in life is a key foundation of wisdom. I am convinced also that the deeper one’s understanding of how “the ovarian lottery” (though I might use a broader term) works, the more compassion is possible, both for self and others.
Here’s a complementary link I came across the other day, if you care to check it out. I think I got it from Rob Berger’s weekly email.
https://seths.blog/2025/07/seeing-the-lottery/
I’d like to note, too, that one aspect of the “lottery” that could use more appreciation is the aspect of timing, i.e., the era in which we were born.
(Brought to mind is a fantastic book, in general and with regard to considering luck and fate, “Destiny of the Republic” about the fate of one of the most interesting and little-known U.S. presidents, James Garfield, and the state of 19th century medicine, among other things.)
Separately, it seems to me that the aphorism about “making one’s own luck” is kinda sorta useful, as it can be a spur to effort and can allow some patting of one’s own back after success in an endeavor. On the other hand, it can’t be taken as a literal truth because luck, by definition, is something that is beyond our control rather than something we create.
Also, more than passing acceptance of an idea like “you make your own luck” allows for some spectacular cherry picking of reality. It allows, too, for condescension or scorn toward others who we might like to consider lazy or stupid or otherwise less worthy when we assume a great deal but actually know precious little about the myriad causes of their circumstances and capacities, or lack thereof. Or for a completely different sort of example, we might consider the recent history of a person we all admire, Jonathan Clements.
Thanks for the link. I especially liked “Don’t give lottery winners more credit than they deserve.”
I agree with you about timing. I got a job in tech at a time when the company hiring me was looking for people with a degree in any subject who could do well on their aptitude test. I would not get that job today.
When I look back on my life, there were several instances where I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Was that all due to luck or some choices I made? Not sure. Individuals who are optimistic and driven may create their own “good luck” by noticing and capitalizing on opportunities, when others miss them.
Your comment begs the question of why you made the choices that proved to be advantageous. The choices we make are no doubt strongly influenced by both environmental and genetic factors. In other words, luck has a strong influence on individual differences in the ability to create one’s own good luck.
In that regard, optimism and pessimism have been shown to have distinct genetic links.
A general positive genetics factor exerted significant links among both personality and life-orientation traits. Both optimism bias and pessimism also showed genetic variance distinct from all effects of personality and from each other.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2015.1015155
Having a plan probably helps, too.
I was born to a poor Greek immigrant family in Turkey. They didn’t want us Greeks there so they deported us just like what is happening in the U.S. now. We went back to Greece but were lucky enough to have my mother’s brother who had illegally jumped a commercial ship and became a resident and then a citizen of the U.S. who sponsored us to come and live in Baltimore. We moved to Baltimore and worked hard to live the American dream. I always wonder what my life would have been like if we stayed in Constantinople where I was born if they hadn’t deported us or in Athens our second stop before Baltimore.
Born in Australia into a caring, stable family. Good health all my life, a brain that (sort of) works. I’ve worked hard and tried to make good decisions, but without my extraordinarily luck in the genetic lottery, it would all be for nought.
Great article, thank you.
I happen to believe that luck — particularly where, when and with what you are born — is a primary driver of how your life will turn out.
Much of that luck is determined before you are born — what talents, intellectual abilities and handicaps you are born with, what kind of parents you have, and where on this planet you make your debut are critical. Being born in Boston or Berlin rather than Bangladesh makes a huge difference in the arc of your life. Economic status matters massively. So do health, race, gender and physical appearance.
And none of those are things you have any control over.
My dad used to say “the harder I work, the luckier I get”. I also like the saying, “luck is when preparation meets opportunity”.
Well 250,000 people around the world are struck by lightning annually … don’t see the “hard work” thing coming into play there
Hard work certainly helps, but not necessarily enough. Consider Bill Gates. There is no equivalent of Microsoft for MACs, because Apple kept OS development in house. If IBM had done the same, instead of erroneously thinking PCs would be a niche market, likely no Microsoft.
One of the things that I find interesting is the widespread notion that being a hard worker has little or nothing to do with luck. Those who hold this notion rarely ask themselves why people differ so much in how hard they work.
I think it is clear that those lucky enough to have had parents who empasized the importance of working hard are more likely to be hard workers.
In addition, the Big 5 personality trait of conscientiousness has an estimated genetic heritability of 40%-50% based on studies of identical twins reared apart. The sub-traits of conscientiousness include achievement striving, cautiousness, dutifulness, orderliness, self-discipline, and self-efficacy.
Hard work is often not enough. I was listening to a Planet Money podcast last night on the meaning of “made in America”. It featured a very hard working immigrant who was making below minimum wage at piece work rates for a garment manufacturer. Hard work is probably necessary, except for the really lucky (e.g. rich parents) but hardly sufficient.
The hardest-working subsistence rice farmer in Bengladesh will likely live and die with no opportunity to be anything but a subsistence rice farmer.
I’ve always looked at it as a three-legged stool – hard work, opportunity, and a little luck.
When I was a young fellow growing up, my parents were Presbyterians. One of the beliefs of this sect is that everything that happens to a person is predestined by their deity. This, of course, includes whether or not one ends up in heaven or hell. I couldn’t get my mind around this concept. I mean, if you are going to hell anyway, what difference does it matter what you do?
On December 26, 2004 there was an EQ greater than M9 in the Indian Ocean. 227,000 people had a very bad day.
The entire existence of humans on a 4.5Billion year old planet required so many disparate events to occur in the right sequence that it boggles the mind.
Only in America, do we believe that we can control what happens in our lives; that if people just tried harder, they wouldn’t be standing on that corner holding a sign begging for money.
I was in SE Asia in December 2004. Very fortunately, I had decided to spend Christmas in land-locked Laos instead of on a Thai island.
The trouble with “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is that you need bootstraps. And boots. I have never bought into the rugged individualism myth, but then I was born in England.
People like to believe that what they can control matters more than what they can’t. I don’t think that’s necessarily true, but I’m just a random guy on the internet. I will never understand why people hate attributing their success to good luck though, it screams ego to me.
Being born after the rise of capitalism is perhaps the luckiest thing of all, it’s lifted more people out of poverty than was thought possible and provided more goods, more services, more everything.
I count my blessings all the time, and often tell folks how lucky I’ve been, and continue to be.
One can do everything “right” but Providence should never be ignored. At times things can and do go awry. What matters is how we operate when adversity occurs.
It only takes a few seconds for things to change – from a car accident, for instance.
I had a huge amount of good fortune not least of which was being adopted by two great parents. Many adoptees are not so lucky. Continuing the adoption theme later in life, I was lucky that DNA testing came along with services like Ancestry and 23andMe around the same time that the closed adoption law in New York State also was changed to allow access to birth records. I have found two siblings, 2 nieces, a nephew and several cousins late in life that I have developed relationships with-a true blessing.
Glad that worked for you, but if I had been a birth mother promised confidentiality I might well have been upset about the change in the law.
For some birth parents that may be true and this was the argument for many years. The growing consensus in changing open records laws over time is that adoptees rights have been ignored for too long and there are lots of reasons, including health reasons, why it is useful to open the records. There is huge pain for many adoptees in what is called the mortal wound. About half the states have open records laws now. There is a huge movement toward leveling the playing field in the adoptee triangle. My birth mother was long dead when I confirmed her name. And I say confirmed because I already knew it and my birth father’s name from DNA testing. DNA testing is the real boon to folks who are searching whether it be birth parents or adoptees. Searches by birth mothers are also very popular. I met my birth mother’s close friend (who still alive at 101..) and who said she would have been thrilled to met me and my half sister to whom she also gave up for adoption. Cousins on the other side said the same about my birth father. My other half sister met her mother once who wanted nothing to do with her. I feel sorry for her but this happens regularly also.
I don’t have a problem with changing the laws going forward, it’s the retroactive change that concerns me.
There is a range of laws and in most states that have opened records there are restrictions in place to protect confidentiality including mutual consent including checking if birth parents are still living. The laws have evolved to recognize adoptee rights when in the past we had very little. Regardless, DNA testing makes it virtually a moot point.
Excellent article Kathy. Our efforts surely matter, but the list of obstacles I didn’t have to overcome is way longer than the list of ones I did overcome.
And being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference. Of course, so could the reverse!