When was the last time you heard some super-successful entrepreneur say ”I owe it all to luck!” I’m going to guess maybe never.

And yet, our lives are often filled with chance occurrences, fortuitous encounters, or unlucky twists of fate that heavily influence success or failure. This is not to denigrate the role of knowledge, experience, courage, and skill. Being lucky usually won’t bring success if you don’t have the other prerequisites. But the opposite is true more often than we think – lots of people may hold the prerequisites, but good fortune often chooses the winners.

Let me offer an example from my own life.

In 1972, I decided to run for political office in New York City. I was too naïve to realize just how crazy a decision that was. My opponent was a popular incumbent, well-known and well-respected in the community. He headed the established political club in the neighborhood, while mine was a virtual unknown. His campaign infrastructure was large; mine consisted of three other people and myself. If he had to, he could have outspent me many times over.

Professional politicians have a name for this kind of lopsided race: they call it a “suicide run.”

Fortune, however, smiled on me. Several weeks into the race, my opponent was nominated for a judgeship, and he immediately stepped down from the race. His successor was picked not for his political skills, but for his years of loyal service.

In the days before television advertising and high-priced direct mail campaigns, local campaigns could be won “in the streets,” as we used to say. I had a gift for street campaigning, and my opponent did not. I won by less than 100 votes out of almost 2500 cast.

Was I a good candidate? I was a great candidate. Did I outwork my opponent? You bet. Was our campaign smarter and more effective than theirs? It sure was. Could I have won without that judgeship? Not in a New York minute.

Though I did not fully realize it at the time – I was way too busy being full of myself – my political career was launched by pure chance.

How Chance Intervenes
Few things in life are chancier than being adopted. Steve Jobs was adopted and raised in Palo Alto, California – just about Ground Zero for the technology culture that so inspired him growing up. What if his adoptive parents were from Napa Valley instead of Silicon Valley? There would almost certainly never have been an Apple Computer. And it would have been left to someone besides Steve Jobs to transform both consumer technology and the way we run our lives.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell cites dozens of examples of how chance intervenes in startling ways that we rarely realize or talk about.

In the eighth grade, Gladwell writes, Bill Gates and some of his friends, through a special connection, were granted virtually unlimited online access to computers at the University of Washington campus. It was an astonishing gift, and the young Gates took full advantage. School for Gates became just a sideline. His real life was computer programming. That first piece of good fortune was followed by others – paid programming gigs, access to programming mentors, exposure to higher-level skills.

By the time he dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, Gates estimates that he had already accumulated more than 10,000 hours of programming experience. Here is how he explains his later success: “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.”

The Role of Birthdays
What does it take to achieve success as a professional athlete? For some, it takes a fortunate date of birth. In hockey, as in most sports, kids begin competing in grammar school. Since kids compete with their classmates, being the oldest in the class rather than the youngest provides a huge competitive advantage. That head start multiplies over time. 40% of Canadian pro hockey players are born between January and March, which, in grammar school, makes them the oldest in their class. Only 10% are born from October through December, which makes them the youngest in their class. The oldest kids wound up with a 4:1 advantage over the youngest.

The same kind of age disparities show up on the academic side as well. Kids are fast-tracked in school the same way that they are on the sports field, and those early differences are just as hard to overcome.

One last story from Malcolm Gladwell’s book. This one is also about the role of birthdates in success. If we look carefully at a list of the 75 wealthiest people in history, from Cleopatra to the present day, 14 of the 75 – almost 20% of the list, were Americans born between 1831 and 1839.

As Gladwell explains it, they were of perfect age to take advantage of the biggest industrial expansion in American history during the 1860s and 1870s. The expansion birthed new industries – and new fortunes – in railroads, oil, banking, finance, steel, manufacturing, streetcars, meatpacking, etc.

Each of these titans was born in just the right decade. When the boom unfolded in front them, they were at their peak of their business prowess, and they made the most of their unprecedented opportunities.

If we believe in having a fair society, then we have to begin to account for the role of chance in people’s lives. Because of the extremes of wealth and poverty in America, we tend to over-reward success, and over-punish its lack. But the line between the two is sometimes very thin, and is often driven as much by chance as ability.

How about you, dear reader? If you have a story of how chance made a difference in your life, email me at the address below. If we get enough responses, we will do a follow-up story.