The #1 Contributor to Career Success

Do you ever wonder if you’ve got the raw talent needed to achieve epic goals? Do you think you have the brainpower it takes to be super successful?

A 2018 study reported in Nature concluded that talent is necessary and, in fact, it’s particularly important in highly complex jobs. Smart helps! A high IQ also can open doors, especially during the early stages of a career.

But the most successful individuals are seldom the most talented—often they’re simply the luckiest.

Here’s how the major factors are ranked in order of how much they each contribute to career success:

Does that surprise you?

This ranking is a generalized synthesis drawn from empirical studies by psychologists, economists, and other authorities attempting to explain success.^* So take it seriously!

Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman said, “Luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.” But is luck always a completely random happening, a result of pure chance? Should you just resign yourself to providence or fate? No, some people are far luckier than others because of their personal behavior.

– You can do things to increase the odds that good fortune comes your way.

– You can engineer luck into your life and business.

However, here’s what hit me a couple of years ago: Books and courses on self-improvement or how to succeed have basically ignored luck as a premier driver of success. In 2023, AMAZON reportedly offered over 57,000 books with “leadership” in the title. But I found less than a dozen books focused on luck.

That’s why I decided to write Lucky You!

As I explain in that handbook, luck is a powerful Unseen Force. An invisible agent. It’s a quirky phenomenon, wild and free, too unpredictable to count on yet too important for you to ignore.

So often, though, people fail to recognize luck’s presence. Golden opportunities go unnoticed or disregarded. And many times, people know a lucky break lies before them, but they’re afraid to take advantage of it.

Here’s the question: How can you maximize your luckiness?

Psychological research and neuroscientific studies provide solid guidelines. For example, maintaining an optimistic mindset predisposes you to recognize luck when it comes within your reach. And giving yourself permission to take risks positions you to seize those opportunities. There’s also an array of additional guidelines given in Lucky You!

Luck is your best point of leverage for career success. Learn how to invite it into your life.

“Luck is most frequently the reason for extreme success.”

—Nassim Nicolas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan

^*(Estimates informed by research from Alessandro Pluchino et al. (2018), Robert H. Frank (2016), Angela Duckworth (2016), Malcolm Gladwell (2008), Daniel Kahneman, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. This distribution reflects a broad interdisciplinary consensus that non-meritocratic factors—particularly luck and access to opportunity—play a dominant role in determining career outcomes.)