The music lab, success is partly luck
Researchers have tested this many times, in different places, over many years, and they keep finding the same result. This one is safe to trust.
Researchers built an online music site and recruited thousands of teenagers to listen to and download songs by unknown bands. Secretly, they split the participants into separate parallel worlds. In some worlds, people could see how many times each song had been downloaded by others before them. In others, they could not, and judged the songs on their own. The result was striking. In the worlds where people could see popularity, which songs became hits varied enormously from world to world, even though every world started with the identical songs. A song that became a runaway hit in one world flopped in another. What drove it was early chance, a few random early downloads made a song look popular, which drew more downloads, which snowballed. Quality mattered somewhat, truly bad songs rarely won and truly great ones rarely died, but among the many decent songs, success was largely determined by lucky early momentum, not merit.
Success is a mix of quality and luck, and in the wide middle range where things are merely good rather than obviously terrible or brilliant, luck and early momentum often decide the outcome more than merit does. The same song, the same idea, the same person can succeed wildly in one set of circumstances and fail in another, driven by small early accidents that snowball. This should make you humble about winners and generous toward those who did not win, because the gap between them is often smaller and more accidental than the success story admits. It also means that when you judge people by their outcomes, you are partly judging their luck, and mistaking it for their worth.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, 2018
On the science of success, and how much of it comes from networks and luck rather than merit alone.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.