The role of luck in success

Successful and…lucky?

A recent conversation about the merit of the idealized system of meritocracy here on LinkedIn led me to some personal introspection.

People who have worked really hard for their success often discount the role of luck in helping to get them where they are. Often, this takes the form of surviorship bias which is a “cognitive shortcut that occurs when a successful subgroup is mistaken as the entire group, due to the invisibility of the failure subgroup.”

I had discounted the role of lady luck. I didn’t want to think anything but my ridiculous amount of effort and work led to my tenure track role in academia.

Unfortunately, those tenure track positions are relatively rare in modern academia.

A study published in 2019 showed only 23% of life and health sciences PhD graduates go on to secure a tenure track positions. And while this potential for faculty success varies by discipline, it is a part of the nationwide trend of decreasing tenured faculty positions and increasing at-will labor, adjunct positions. And this has been ongoing for nearly 50 years now, since 1975:

“Nationwide between 1975 and 2007, tenure-track faculty declined from 56 to 31 percent in all fields. Meanwhile the ranks of part-time and non–tenure track faculty—who labor for lower pay and no benefits or job security—grew from 43 to 68 percent.”

I have never thought of myself as a particularly lucky person. I don’t win raffles or sweepstakes, guess the winning lotto numbers or have Midas' gift of seeing everything I touch turn to gold in someway.

I do see myself as an exceptionally hard-working person however, so the notion that luck played a role in my ability to become a tenure track and then tenured professor frankly made me a bit irritated.

I put in the grueling time during my graduate studies, working nights, weekends and whenever else it was needed. Even more time than one might expect, as I completed my Master’s and PhD in 4 years instead of 6 in order to maintain my line of funding.

What did luck have to do with that?

I taught myself how to write a winning letter of application for academic jobs, turning a 0% response rate into 50%. I didn’t glimpse any benevolent leprechauns lurking in the corner during this anxious last year of graduate school.

But lady luck was surely in the background working in her mysterious ways. The fact that there were tenure track jobs for me to apply to in the first place was one result of this mysterious force.

I’m a part of the millennial generation. This gave me the luck factor of timing in trying to obtain a tenure line faculty role. When I finished graduate school in 2014/2015, the economy was recovering from the 2008/2009 recession. Younger Millennial and Older Generation Z cohorts were still strong in number, maintaining consistent demand for college educations.

And Baby Boomer faculty cohort members were retiring, leaving space for new scholars.

This lucky timing ensured that my hard work had somewhere to land in academia. Even though obtaining a tenure track job is a primary motivation for attending graduate school shared by many students, I’m not sure that this newest generation of graduate students will be so fortunate.

If the odds aren’t in your favor, will you have the opportunities needed for success?

Acknowledging that there was luck at work in getting my position doesn’t mean I didn’t work incredibly hard as well, and likewise the lack of luck enjoyed by someone else striving for this type of position doesn’t mean that they didn’t work just as hard, if not even harder than I did.

I'm curious to know if you're a graduate student, or work directly with them?

Do you know someone pursuing their graduate studies?

What do you think is needed for graduate students to successfully navigate the rocky professional landscape we're faced with today?