Why You Didn’t Earn Your Successes
Happiness is something you have, but success you’ve got to earn—or so we think. Take stock and ask yourself: how successful has my life been so far? Use a scale from +10 (superstar) to -10 (total loser). Jot down your answer in the margin. Then ask yourself a follow-up question: how much of this success can be attributed to your own actions—to your effort, your work, your input? In other words, how much of your success is truly your own? And how much is down to chance, to factors beyond your control? Note down these two as percentages. I’d guess you attributed something like 60 percent to your own achievement and 40 percent to factors beyond your control. At least, that’s the answer I get from most people.
Now I want you to run a little thought experiment I got from Warren Buffett: “Imagine there are two identical twins in the womb, both equally bright and energetic. And the genie says to them, ‘One of you is going to be born in the United States, and one of you is going to be born in Bangladesh. And if you wind up in Bangladesh, you will pay no taxes. What percentage of your income would you bid to be the one that is born in the United States?’” Buffett is speaking here about the ovarian lottery. You could substitute Great Britain, Germany or any other developed nation for the USA, of course. How would you reply?
Most people I ask put the figure at 80 percent. I’d say the same. In other words, we’re prepared to sacrifice an extremely high proportion of our income to grow up in our preferred country. The fact that our place of birth is worth that much money to us makes it clear how greatly it influences our success.
The ovarian lottery doesn’t end with your country of origin. You weren’t just born in a particular nation, but in an area with a particular postcode and into a particular family. None of that is within your control. You have been given values, behaviors and principles that help or hinder you in everyday life, and again these are beyond your control. You were slotted into an educational system with teachers you didn’t choose. You got sick, suffered fortune’s slings and arrows (or were spared them), and were responsible for absolutely none of it. You slipped into a series of roles and you made decisions—based on what? Perhaps you read a book that changed your life—but how did you come to hear about it? Say you met somebody who opened doors for you, without which you wouldn’t have got where you are today. Who do you have to thank for this acquaintance?
Even if you’ve had your fair share of tussles with fate, you’ve got to admit that you’re enormously lucky. Six percent of all the people who have ever lived on Earth are alive at this moment. To put it another way, six percent of all the people who have been born over the last 300,000 years—since Homo sapiens populated the world—are alive in the present day. They could just as easily have been born into another era; indeed, the probability of that is 94 percent. Imagine yourself as a slave in the Roman Empire, a geisha during the Ming Dynasty, a water-carrier in ancient Egypt. How many of your inborn talents would have been worth much in those environments?
My wife and I have twins, the non-identical kind. The one who’s forty seconds older has blonde hair and blue eyes, while the second has black hair and dark eyes. Although we made every effort to bring up both boys in the same way, their personalities are fundamentally different. One is always in a good mood; he’s warm and open with other people. The second finds it difficult to socialize, but he’s extremely skillful at anything that involves using his small hands. He has been since birth. The haphazard mixing of my wife’s genes and mine produced two new human beings. Similarly, your genes are a coincidental blend of your parents’, which in turn are a coincidental blend of your grandparents’ genes, and so on and so forth. During the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, there were approximately four thousand people alive who contributed genetic material to your contemporary mixture. You are their descendant. Did you recruit any of these four thousand people? No. Think about that next time you visit Versailles.
What you are, you owe to your genes—and the environment in which your genetic blueprint was realized. Even your level of intelligence is largely determined by your genes. So is whether you’re introverted or extroverted, open-minded or anxious, reliable or sloppy. If you believe your success is based on relentlessly hard work, on driving tenacity and far too many night shifts, you’re not necessarily wrong. It’s just that you owe the willpower you’re so proud of to the interplay between your genes and environment.
So, given all that: what proportion of your success would you ascribe to your own achievement? Correct. The logical answer is zero percent. Your successes are fundamentally based on things over which you have no control whatsoever. You haven’t really “earned” your achievements.
Two consequences. First: stay humble—especially if you’re successful. The greater your success, the less you should toot your own horn. Modesty has fallen out of fashion these days, and there’s nothing we like better than showing off on social media. Restrain yourself. I’m not talking about false modesty here, but the genuine article. The thing is, you see, that people who pat themselves on the back—even if they do so quietly—have been taken in by an illusion. Pride is not only pointless; it’s also factually misplaced. Getting rid of it is a fundamental cornerstone of the good life (more on that in Chapter 51). Remind yourself daily that everything you are, everything you have and can do, is the result of blind chance. For those of us blessed with good luck—i.e., for you and me—gratitude is the only appropriate response. One nice side effect is that grateful people are demonstrably happier people.
Second: willingly and ungrudgingly surrender part of your (unearned) success to people who were born with the wrong genes into the wrong families, in the areas with the wrong postcodes. It’s not just noble; it’s commonsensical. Donations and taxes aren’t financial matters. First and foremost, they’re issues of morality.