Luck: The Key to Success

At its core, success boils down to the combination of three essential ingredients: talent, commitment, and opportunity. Talent is innate; it cannot be taught or attained through experience yet it is the base of the pyramid we call success. Commitment, on the other hand, is acquired through foresight and aspiration. At the top of the pyramid lies opportunity; it is the quality that distinguishes the outstanding from the average. Those outstanding people are forever indebted to both the seeming negligible, and the obviously beneficial opportunities they were presented with.

Talent is the foundation of a success, without it commitment and opportunity have nothing to build on, even so, talent alone is not success. Take Christopher Langan for example, the media has dubbed him “the smartest man in America.” In fact he may even be the smartest person in the world. Einstein is the embodiment of intellectual success; his IQ is document to be 160. In 1999, the TV show 20/20 aired and interview with neuropsychologist Robert Novelly, in which he confirmed that Christopher Langan’s IQ was 210. Dr. Novelly also described Langan’s IQ as “the highest individual that I have ever measured in 25 years." In high school he earned a perfect score on the SAT even though he fell asleep during the test. Langan attended Montana State University, but his financial problems, and his belief that he could teach his professors more than they could teach him led him to drop out Langan is known mostly for his part in developing the "theory of the relationship between mind and reality." Beyond that his name rarely surfaces while defining success. Even though he possessed such amazing talent Langan did not become a billionaire entrepreneur, instead he took a strin...

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...ly was well off; they could afford to send him to Lakeside one of the few schools with access to a time share terminal in 1968. He also happened to live a walking distance from University of Washington. Together these pivotal opportunities can be credited with rising Bill Gates to the status he is at now.

Success is often thought to be the product of creativity, leadership and attitude. While many successful people possess these qualities they are not the building blocks of success. To become outstanding in a crowd of average people a person must be talent and willing to work hard in his field of choice, most importantly though, he or she must be lucky. Every successful person from the dawn of humanity until this very moment is the product of favorable odds.

Works Cited

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and, 2008. Print.