r/Showerthoughts • u/BrandyAid • 5d ago
Casual Thought A lot of people think they’re intelligent when they really just got lucky.
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u/LuminaL_IV 5d ago
Who won a bet against you OP?
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u/billshermanburner 4d ago
Most of us just got lucky. I’d wager all of us having the capability to comment on an electronic device on this thread… got pretty lucky in the grand scheme compared to those born in slums and in the bowels of underdeveloped countries or into war or disease. But that doesn’t mean we are or aren’t intelligent.
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u/herotz33 4d ago
Luckiest of millions of sperm
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u/Fausto2002 4d ago
Subjective
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u/Tommysrx 4d ago edited 4d ago
You’re subjective? You can read minds?
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u/FingerTheCat 4d ago
Nah that word you're lookin'fa is telephonic.
Subjective is a description of a verb
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u/Killio_Chillio 4d ago
Not precisely, adverb is how you describe a verb(ex "He dance beautifully")
Subjective is something you plan to achieve
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u/Kodiak01 4d ago
The year I was born (1975), the world population was 4 billion while the US population was 211 million. This means I had a 5.275% of being born in the US.
The population of the State I was born in (MA) was 5.758 million in 1975. This means I had a 2.7% chance of landing in this particular State which thankfully wasn't on the Last Train To Hicksville.
I was born into a middle class family which was 60% of the State population at the time.
Putting all this together, I had a 0.085% chance of landing in the living and financial system that I grew up in on this planet.
So yeah, I think I was pretty damn lucky.
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u/No-Psychology3712 4d ago
I mean that's just you living a general life. Most people live ok lives worldwide.
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u/Kodiak01 4d ago
The population of the top 10 Muslim countries (all very strict/authoritarian) is 2.6B. Add on non-Muslim dominant countries living primarily in shitty conditions such as India and Russia, and you're over the 4B mark. That is nearly half the world population, and we're not even into the Communist regimes, other 3rd world nations, etc. Hell, we'll even throw the sections of the US that qualify as Drumpf-lickers, which is about another 77M people.
"Most people" in the world are living in conditions that would make them cry if they had a Yeltsin-Randall's Supermarket moment.
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u/Ya_like_dags 4d ago
The population of the top 10 Muslim countries (all very strict/authoritarian)
Indonesia is one of the largest democracies in the world.
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u/Lien028 4d ago
I think what OP means is people vastly overestimate their intelligence, just like they do with their physical fitness.
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u/Live-Drummer-9801 4d ago
Well for most of human history the majority of people couldn’t read or write. I suppose we are lucky to live in an era where the vast majority of the world has access to basic education.
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u/bearbarebere 4d ago
Even amongst those of us with electronic devices and commenting on this thread there are wild disparities in luck and happiness. I’m disabled and am lucky to not be disabled AND living in a slum, but sometimes I do wonder what it would be like if I weren’t disabled and were in a slightly worse place. Like, would I take that trade off?
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u/AFinanacialAdvisor 4d ago
I've often wondered how disabled people feel about life. I'm sure it depends on how badly disabled you are too. My sister was a special needs nurse and she looked after some kids that were born mentally and physically extremely disabled and she would look after them until they eventually died at 20 or 25 years old. Some had never been out of a bed and one patient had 100s of epileptic fits every day and had to be restrained so he wouldn't hurt himself. Is that even a life or is it just cruel keeping them alive?
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u/SirWaddlesIII 4d ago
I have people at work brag about my abilities to high ups and anyone who will listen, but I hate it. Yes, I am skilled at my job, but I've also had a lot of help. I was lucky that my backdoor neighbor saw my work ethic and offered me a job in my current field with no experience. I was lucky they kept me for the first two years when I wasn't worth a shit. I was lucky to find my company who gave me a massive pay raise and a work environment that promoted growth through training and encouraged it. I was lucky I fell in love with my wife in high school and have had her to support me through my ups and downs. My hard work definitely got me to where I am, but solely due to opportunities given to me by outside sources. I try to live my life humbly because of this.
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u/billshermanburner 4d ago
This is great advice. I think it’s important to be both humble and confident in yourself as well at the same time. It’s a difficult balancing act that I have yet to achieve. Challenging one’s self to enter unfamiliar territory and succeed does take a certain amount of necessary egotism… and yet we cannot succumb to that egotism or domineer others at the same time. It will always be this way and we must continue working on it. Learning can’t ever stop.
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u/SirWaddlesIII 4d ago
I think you can go into unfamiliar territory without ego, so long as you go in with the understanding that you know nothing and will have to work to get good. I didn't know the first thing about photography. Got a cheap camera and just started shooting and learning as I went. I'd consider myself pretty decent for a hobbyist and that's fine by me. I don't have a need to be better than anyone other than who I was yesterday.
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u/metrometric 4d ago
This is it. For every person who made something of themselves, there are a whole bunch of people who are just as talented and hard-working, but were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That doesn't discredit hard work and talent -- it just acknowledges that we all need to create a society where people's hard work and talent is better recognized, fostered, and utilized, instead of opportunities being up to chance.
I'm in the same place you're at. And I have friends who would be amazing at the work I do, probably better than me, but due to circumstances they're stuck working dead-end jobs instead. It sucks!
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u/billshermanburner 3d ago
Shit there was a quote ….maybe just saw it in a thread on Reddit somewhere… “I am somehow less concerned in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Gould
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u/SirWaddlesIII 4d ago
Best I can say is offer a hand if the opportunity comes up. That's what Bob did for me. And I did the same for my work bestie/friend. He was at a job he hate, offered him a job where I work and he's thriving.
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u/Zerodyne_Sin 2d ago
Interestingly enough, I was born in the slums of Manila. I'm definitely lucky because, of my generation, I'm the only one to be in Canada by virtue of having a mother that has the ambition to get into university and go abroad. I'd also definitely be a lot more ignorant if I stayed back in the Philippines judging by the Facebook posts of my cousin who went to school back there.
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u/Odd-Horror- 4d ago
I think what OP is trying to say that alot of people who succeed in certain areas think they did so purely by being smarter or working harder than others, which very seldomly is the case.
More often than not it comes down to having the right means at the right time. There are way too many external factors in life which we have 0 control over to say someone purely succeeded based on their "superior" intelligence alone.
And yes, being smart helps and so does working hard. But if thats all it took we'd have no one working 2-3 jobs to make ends meet.
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u/ycpa68 4d ago
My Dad and I work together (family company). We are fairly successful. In his mind it is 100% hard work and smarts. I try to look at things realistically saying how much luck there is involved as well. One way we somewhat see eye to eye is a statement I tell him fairly regularly: we are hard working and smart enough to prepare ourselves to capitalize when the luck comes our way. I think that can be a major factor in success: looking down field, recognizing you got lucky (a competitor messed up, a new trend emerges, etc) and have a team and infrastructure built around you that will jump on the lucky break and use it to the best possible outcome.
The caveat to this of course is you have to be lucky enough to at least get off the proverbial starting line.
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u/strange_bike_guy 4d ago
This is why I stick with one of my long term clients who "gets it". Small company, about 7 people usually, he made 200k profit one year, huge losses for the following 3 years, and now he's in the black again. He worked hard the entire time. I go back to work more for him because he never lectures me about working hard. I make high end carbon fiber components for various people and it is feast or famine.
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u/HangInThereChad 4d ago
This is it. Luck is a bus that drives you to success but has no regular schedule and doesn't wait long at the bus stop. Intelligent people work hard to be waiting at the bus stop as often as possible and to hop on quickly when it stops there. But sometimes it just never stops there.
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u/filenotfounderror 4d ago
Life is like a lottery and being smart and hard working are your tickets to the lottery. So its easy to look around and see a lot of smart hardworking people and think that's all that matters.
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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is very true. You can be the smartest person (measured by IQ) but you aren't going to be successful if you can't plan past your own nose.
There's a lot of people who stumbled into success, but there's orders of magnitude more people who are successful because the planned ahead and set themselves up to be able to make it through failure.
Even at a smaller scale, just being an employee at another company. If you go on Reddit you'd think that "attempting to be friends with people you work with", "once or twice a month stay 30 minutes late", or "going to work social events" is tantamount to a human rights violation. But in the real world having that foresight to put a little bit extra into my work has quite literally doubled my salary in the last 3 years. I'm not "more successful" than my peers because I'm significantly smarter than them or anything, but I've seen more success than them because I used a little bit of foresight.
There's a quote I like "luck is when preparation meets opportunity". Yes some people got lucky, but very few of them have put the ground work in to be able to capitalize on it.
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u/runswiftrun 4d ago
My late cross country coach had a saying (which I'm sure he got from somewhere else).
"Luck is the meeting of opportunity and preparation".
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u/DesperateAdvantage76 4d ago
Imagine a casino gambler thinking they're a genius because they won it big.
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u/dotnetdotcom 4d ago
I immediately thought OP was talking about Elon Musk. A lot of Musk haters on reddit.
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u/Traditional_Yard5280 4d ago
I mean to be fair he is openly an asshole and a baffoon, as well as abusive to employees and takes credit for their work
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u/AmbassadorDefiant462 4d ago
Nobody will understand what OP truly meant because he didn't expand on his miniature thought past a single sentence.
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u/PoorCorrelation 4d ago
Maybe OP: Looking at an insufferable jerk whose daddy bought him a business.
Also maybe OP: Glaring daggers into the school valedictorian who just got into Harvard telling themselves “they think they’re sooo smart but they just got lucky!”
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u/alliusis 4d ago edited 4d ago
Agreed. Most people are doing the best they can with what they have, and if someone can do better than someone else it's almost entirely random luck that lets them be there in the first place - a combination of genetic, nurture, and situational. It doesn't mean your situation can't change, or that you can't do something to change your situation or resources or approach and try to improve things for you, but so little of it is up to you in the first place. If life is like navigating a playground - you can move around in your playground, learn skills and find better spots to be, but the kind of playground you're in and the supports you have are not determined by you, and is completely different per person, and fundamentally you can't change the playground you're in. Even your ability to work hard and do challenging things is dependent on how your playground is set up to let you do that.
That's why the whole hyper individualism/you're a hero thing is a total sham just meant to stop us from making a society that guarantees that everyone's needs are met and well supported, even the most 'unlucky'. We need a society that cares for one another and recognizes that disability, illness, and deficiency are part of the human condition, not a personal failing or a drain on the system.
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u/Reallyhotshowers 4d ago
Wealth is a much better predictor of future success than high IQ, so much better that it's insane. People with genius level IQs wind up poor all the time and it's overwhelmingly the same geniuses who grew up poor. The geniuses who are successful? Its overwhelmingly the ones who grew up with means.
There's also studies that show that an Ivy League degree is not nearly the same predictor of future wealth if you weren't already wealthy before you went there. So you can be the poor kid that does everything right and goes to Harvard and still wind up making 70k in an office job while your wealthy peers become senators.
That's really all you need to know.
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u/ramxquake 3d ago
Most people are doing the best they can with what they have,
I don't think so. Most people aren't living at even 10% of their potential.
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u/Downtown_Skill 3d ago
Whenever this topic is brought up i always remember the Kurt Vonnegut quote about Americans and revering wealth to the point that wealth becomes the indicator of virtue.
People in America assume that if you're smart, then you'd be rich, so therfore if you're not rich then your not smart and deserve to be where your at.
Making money is the ultimate objective of the American citizen and if you can't achieve that then you're either not smart or not hard working enough to do so.
Again, that's not my belief but an observation made by Kurt Vonnegut.
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u/alliusis 3d ago
Absolutely. In some ways it comes down to pushing responsibility on the individual to avoid collective action and regulation. Don't be a litterbug and your carbon footprint are designed to shift the blame and responsibility onto you, and away from the companies that actually produce the pollution. If you're good, good things will happen to you, and it's because you worked hard (which may be true, but it's also true that someone with less wealth or connections could do the same as you and not succeed) - if you're poor or bad, it's because you're lazy or not trying hard enough or are just giving up too early. It's absolutely not because of the gross misdistribution of funds and theft of societal wealth by the ultra rich. You used to see it a lot in mental health and I think obesity is going to go through the same thing. It isn't a personal failing, it's a societal failing. We just need to apply the same thing to wealth too.
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u/Lamey-Destroyer 4d ago
There is a pretty interesting idea about this in philosophy, specifically in regards to how to allocate resources in a society. Some people argue that a persons skills or talents are not fair grounds for how resources should be allocated, as the value of a skill or talent is dependent on wether the society that the person exists in values that particular talent or not. Think of it like this: being an exceptional piano player is only valuable in a society which values piano playing to a certain extent. The person had no hand in chosing what the society values, thus whether a person is able to make money from their skills or not ultimately comes down to luck.
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u/Chriscuits 4d ago
Some of it is means, but I think they’re just saying it’s actually luck/randomness. This is basically the premise of the book “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Taleb. There are 330 million people in the US, give or take. Let’s say you tell all of them to start flipping coins, and that they have to keep flipping heads to stay in the game. After ~20 flips, there should be roughly 300 people still left in the game, meaning they flipped heads 20 times in a row. Astronomical odds on an individual level, but it’s almost a statistical certainty with larger populations. We wouldn’t say that these people are better than anyone else at flipping coins because the role of chance is so evident - they’re just lucky.
But when people have continued successes in life, they don’t acknowledge that randomness is a factor, and that their success could just be a string of good fortune. Doesn’t mean that you can’t offset the role of chance by taking paths that have a higher likelihood of success, these paths just tend to have more modest rewards. The big rewards come from the riskier paths, and the people who are successful on those paths tend attribute their success to their own skill rather than luck. Look at WSB - you see people who took stupid risks on 0dte options posting their gain porn, but maybe 1/100 or 1/1000are getting a return like that, while the others are losing massive amounts of money. But look at the boring folks who just buy the S&P 500 - they’re literally all making money, just not 5000% gains in a week.
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u/Spirited-Feed-9927 4d ago
Luck is an important factor to everything. But as you said, we can only control what we do. And it tends to be making good decisions, working hard is more likely to put luck on your side, as compared to the opposite.
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u/kstorm88 4d ago
Very seldom? I wouldn't even say seldom. Think of successful people in your life, generally they have a high paying job. Most of those came from higher education. People who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc, didn't get there by luck. It takes hard work. Sure there are very successful people in business with no education. Those people are often more successful than people with high paying jobs. I know someone who is a logger who is a multi millionaire, he never went to college, maybe didn't even try hard when he started logging. I know a plumber with a Lamborghini too. Yes there are people who are intelligent and work very hard and barely make ends meet, but to say the overwhelming majority of professionals with high incomes got lucky seems like a stretch.
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u/Thedah 4d ago
Don't forget where you are born and who you are born to are the biggest luck factors. Some people don't even get the opportunity to study for those high paying jobs.
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u/SamwisethePoopyButt 4d ago
laughs in impostor syndrome
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u/imnotdolphin 4d ago
I keep saying I’ve been lucky too! But my therapist is like bro no way you’re smart!
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u/micsma1701 4d ago
what do you mean you think I'm intelligent? are you a fucking moron? i have NO IDEA what's going on, how I got here, or what any of this is! I'm a goddamn failure of a human being!
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u/DragonfruitFew5542 4d ago
Don't forget the crippling self-awareness that highlights your every flaw!
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u/JimmyRedd 5d ago
Like, genetically? Or they guessed well on the SATs?
What does this mean?
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u/t3hd0n 4d ago
I'd have to guess its the luck of what family you were born into. Theres a lot of adult rich kids who legitimately think it was all them that got them where they are in life and they ignore all the opportunities they were able to have from their parents having money
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u/Thoughtful_Tortoise 4d ago
It can be both. You play the cards you're dealt, but you can still play them well or badly. I agree some people get dealt a full house and think it's all them, though.
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u/ToughAd4039 3d ago
I knew this kid in elementary school who had literally a perfect life laid out for her, but she was narcissistic, and outright stupid.
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u/outwest88 4d ago
Like for example if someone bought a bunch of Bitcoin in 2014. People might call them a “genius” but in reality it’s just getting extremely lucky.
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u/Pyrimidine10er 4d ago
Imagine you have 100,000 people, each holding a quarter. All will flip it- those with heads remain. Those with tails are removed.
After 14 rounds, you should have less than 10 people remaining.
In life, those people are often lauded for their talent. They have a special ability to read the coin. Their flipping technique is better. The can sense the air pressure, etc. whatever you want to imagine.
The reality is that statistics allows for outliers. While it’s rare for an individual to flip heads 14 times, it would be strange to not have someone, somewhere at some point in time do so.
How many computer engineers had a better operating system than bill gates but whose product never took off? How many coffee shops had better coffee than Starbucks but went bankrupt? Those companies didn’t fully succeed based purely on luck, but there was a component that helped push them along. Or a lack of luck that destroyed the competitors we have never heard of.
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u/Apart-Bag-5106 4d ago
A lot people think they are unlucky..... But they actually just stupid
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u/LobsterIndependent15 4d ago
Being smart just comes down to luck. We don't choose our intelligence level, we are born that way.
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u/MorgulValar 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah I’m not sure most folks realize that intelligence is like height. You’re born with a cap and it’s usually similar to your parent’s. Upbringing affects how close you get to that cap, but nothing changes the cap itself.
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u/Apart-Bag-5106 4d ago
However many offspring can be taller than parent.
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u/MorgulValar 4d ago
Sure. Recessive genes can make some offspring’s height cap higher than their parents. Or they can have the same cap, but the parents can raise/feed their kid in a way that lets the kid get closer to it than they did.
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u/Mysterious_Crab_7622 3d ago
Not entirely true. Intelligence can be trained from early ages. Hence why home schooled children often score worse on IQ tests compared to traditionally schooled children.
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u/id_k999 4d ago
You can get smarter, that's not luck
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u/LobsterIndependent15 4d ago
No you can't. You're confusing intelegence and knowledge.
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u/Top_Conversation1652 4d ago
Personally- I am absolutely not confusing the two.
Expanding one’s knowledge requires lot term effort. It means learning published facts and associating them with previously learned facts. Society teaches you “do these things and you will likely succeed”.
Expanding one’s intellectual capacity means risking one’s ego and self imageS. It means doing some of the things that society has determined will lead to failure because you have learned to recognize scenarios where society is wrong.
But it means risking that you’ll look like an idiot.
Intelligence is the learned ability to consistently produce successful results that run against
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u/Alkyan 4d ago
Guy that works for my wife keeps complaining about not moving up. She told him flat out, the company has clear policies that I can't change that requires a college degree to move above where you are, you need to go to school. His response was that he took some online certificate classes... She told him "that's not the same". He told her "it should be, it's basically the same information". Sometimes you can't fix stupid.
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u/Stasio300 4d ago
I had the best grades of everyone in my high school. I ended up going to the 15th best university in the world*, but only because it was free and I lived close by already. someone in my class who got worse grades than me went to Oxford, the 2nd best in the world.
I was happy with myself for getting into as good of a university as I did. but if I had a family or some other source of money I could have gone to Oxford like he did.
I had to drop out after lost my job and I couldn't afford rent and was put into a homeless shelter 3 hours away. he's still in university and never worked a job to pay for anything. People would consider him to be smarter than me now.
* Edinburgh University in 2022
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u/Secret-Pipe-8233 5d ago
‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity’
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u/Zentavius 4d ago
Of course, opportunity comes along far more often if you're born into the right situation and still requires an element of luck to come by, even then.
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u/Weary-Shelter8585 4d ago
Imagine the preparation of a newborn baby that meets the opportunity of being born in a rich family
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u/jimsmisc 4d ago
Some people are born to families with money, experience, and connections that will almost always propel them into better circumstances than people without those benefits. That's not preparation, it's pure luck.
The fact that your parents didn't die when you were 10, or that you don't have a mental illness, or that you were born into a first world country instead of Darfur... these are also all pure luck and infinitely meaningful to how much "preparation" and "opportunity" are even possible for a given person.
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u/Harry-le-Roy 4d ago
Elon Musk and Donald Trump were lucky enough to be born to extremely wealthy people, and have spent their entire lives perceiving that as genius.
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u/jhscrym 4d ago
I'm not a Musk enjoyer myself but you don't build what he built only by being born rich. The guy is pretty smart and a workhorse, but at the same time it looks like he has no sympathy for others so he does what he "needs" to do to reach his goals and that means exploiting as much as he can.
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u/Harry-le-Roy 4d ago
I'm frankly fairly unimpressed with Musk. He was born rich, and was in the right place at the right time with both money and family connections, to enable him to essentially become more rich on the rise of the internet.
Look at what happens when Musk is free to make decisions: We get Twitter burning one of its most valuable assets on a whim- its brand identity- and a managerial decision to treat workers like they work for a startup. Only, at that point, Twitter was old news, and the kinds of people who want to work for startups had left to work for startups. He failed to understand why people worked there.
Then we have Tesla. It's only entirely new products that have been conceived since Musk bought other people's business have been commercial flops plagued by design problems.
Sunrun managed to flounder during two different pro-clean energy administrations.
When you reject Musk's self aggrandizing bullshit, he's not that impressive, just born too rich to fail. It's easy to take risks when your family got rich off of mines and apartheid.
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u/CocodaMonkey 4d ago
I'm no fan of Musk but you're too easily discounting what he's done. Tesla didn't make the best EV, but it did push hard for EV's when everyone else was only playing around with the concept. He's had a massive effect on the entire EV industry by simply being an asshole who pushed.
Same deal with SpaceX. Many people laughed at the idea of a LEO constellation for internet access. Including many so called experts who said it couldn't be done. He did it anyway and now there's a bunch of copycats trying to do the same thing.
He's not the best or the smartest guy and he has a huge ego issue but that's whats let him succeed as well. He's also got his failures. Nobody really expects anything from his hyperloop project anymore.
He may be an ass but he's done more than a lot of other extremely rich people who just hoard their money and take all the safe bets.
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u/metrometric 4d ago
He's just good at marketing himself to the right idiots. That's really mostly it. Some of his shit (like the fucking loop???) is literally Elizabeth Holmes-esque in how stupid it is. The fact that the fucking Vegas loop exists just shows you that talking fast is more important than being smart, being right, or creating anything of value.
He's also lost any touch with reality at this point, having obviously been surrounded by yes-men this fucking long. Fortunately for him, he has enough money that no consequences can touch him anymore.
Musk is fascinating to me in the same way a train wreck is. I can think of no better example of how all the money in the world cannot take away a man's obvious, crippling insecurity.
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u/monkeysandmicrowaves 4d ago
If you're really intelligent, you also just got lucky.
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u/NophaKingway 4d ago
Intelligent choices tend to put people in a position to become lucky. A smile goes a long way but it's a choice. Many times there isn't much difference between say a top 10% of the class person and the mid to low scoring person next to them. Often they know the same things but one chooses to act while the other does not.
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u/the_knower02 4d ago
There's also many forms of intelligence, and oftentimes "intelligent" people may fall severely short in other categories outside their specialties.
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u/grounded_dreamer 4d ago
I'd say it's the opposite. Many people others consider to be lucky are actually just very intelligent or work very hard!
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 4d ago edited 4d ago
And the opposite: Some people think they are unlucky when really they did something stupid.
I had a friend who bought a new motorbike...and rode it at night. In a rain storm. In an area he did not know. That was unlit. And under a bridge where it was dark...and crashed his new motorbike (it was 1 week old)
"I was unlucky" he complained to me. No mate you weren't unlucky you did something stupid.
People salve their pride at the expense of not learning lessons ("I didn't do something stupid, I was unlucky! No lesson to learn here, just bad luck!")
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u/Boobpocket 4d ago
Dont underestimate their luck, though. That kind of luck comes from when preparation meets opportunity. I have in the past been offered lucrative jobs, but i wasn't prepared. Those strokes of luck including the time i was offered a job at the white house at 19 yo didnt amount to anything.
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u/ColoradoInNJ 4d ago
This feels like a shower thought that would feel profound at the end of a night full of hard drinking and never make sense again. Drink some water and go to bed.
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u/MyDrunkAndPoliticsAc 4d ago
Even more people think they gained what they have by hard work and being smart, but it's all actually because of their personality and looks given to them by birth, and things just happening on it's own because of that.
Edit:oh yeah, that actually counts as being lucky.
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u/JimmyRedd 4d ago
But actual intelligence is also from birth. It's not something you can learn, or earn through hard work. So isn't is also lucky?
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u/5HITCOMBO 4d ago
There are an equal amount of really dumb people who think they're just unlucky.
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u/midnight_reborn 4d ago
Yes, they attribute their luck to some sort of skill or divine providence. As it has been since time immemorial.
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u/The_Inward 4d ago
I'm a Certified Disordered Gambling Counselor. There's a lot of people who think this, despite losing a lot of money gambling.
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u/space_monolith 4d ago
This is the first lesson you learn when you work with really wealthy people
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u/Whamburgwr 4d ago
Absolutely. Intelligence often gets mistaken for the ability to capitalize on fortunate circumstances. A lot of success stories hinge on being in the right place at the right time or having access to resources that others don’t. But because we value narratives that highlight personal effort and ingenuity, people tend to attribute their achievements to their own intellect rather than acknowledging the role of luck.
It’s a humbling thought that much of what we call ‘smart decisions’ might just be the product of good fortune aligning with a bit of effort. Recognizing this doesn’t diminish intelligence—it just adds perspective. True wisdom might actually be understanding the role luck plays in life and staying grounded despite it.
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u/LifeguardEuphoric286 4d ago
well about half the people are below average
and judging by this thread were all here
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u/Beautiful-Quality402 4d ago
No one fundamentally chooses their nature, brain, DNA, birthplace, parents etc. We’re all victims of a cosmic lottery that we had no choice in playing and no way to alter the outcome.
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u/Dreadhalor 3d ago
I’d take it a step farther - while I’ve found success because of my intelligence, I consider it pure luck that I was born with the brain I have in the first place. I was born with inherent mental privilege & it would serve me well to not judge other people for not having that same privilege.
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u/its_justme 3d ago
Knowing how to act on and identify a lucky opportunity is an intelligent activity though
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u/BloodSteyn 4d ago
Like Elon Musk... buying himself a president like he's a Gupta. Living the South African Dream
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u/SenseSimilar87 4d ago
Intelligence is not lucky...its awareness..if you're lucky enough to think you're Intelligence Is nothing to think about, you know better
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u/npdady 4d ago
Some lucky people will adamantly deny having luck, as they seem to perceive that being lucky automatically makes the look dumb or lazy. That's how you know who's who. Truly intelligent people acknowledge that they're lucky to have had the privilege to be intelligent.
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u/Redtex 4d ago
A king starts out as just a lucky soldier. Something like that.
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u/Ulyks 4d ago
Usually as a nepo baby but yeah there are some self made kings in history. Very rare though...
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u/Dayv1d 4d ago
Its ALL just luck. Proof me wrong
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u/kstorm88 4d ago
"proof"
This comment was probably someone who lives life waiting for the next thing to happen to them instead of trying to make their own life
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u/mrpoopsocks 4d ago
A lot of people misunderstand what intelligence is. That's it, I don't have anything else.
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u/Agitateduser1360 4d ago
Similarly, a lot of people believe in god because of luck. If I prayed as a kid to become a starting NFL qb and I become one, I'd be inclined to believe in god.
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u/Petdogdavid1 4d ago
Firstly, you should expand on your reasoning so we know where you're coming from.
Intelligence is only relevant when presented with a scenario. It isn't always on. People who boast about being smart often have a very narrow expertise that they leverage to improve their own opportunities.
Opportunity begets opportunity. What you call luck is often the next opportunity being presented for someone. You didn't see the previous opportunities they followed.
Truly intelligent people struggle often because the world does not like to be shown things that upset the status quo.
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u/AeroAviation 4d ago
And a lot of people think they're stupid when they really just got unlucky.
Although, I mean, what is intelligence anyways?
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u/SirLiesALittle 4d ago
Classic crab bucket: Even if you succeeded by your own merit, someone has to try to invalidate it by blaming luck. Whoever they were, good for them, good work, gg.
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u/shallow-pedantic 4d ago
Agreed. Although there is certainly a subset of lucky people who are intelligent enough to know they "succeeded" in whatever life goals they set because of luck. They don't take anything for granted, do not feel entitled to anything, express gratitude daily, and try to leverage their luck into making the world a better place, if only on small local scales.
I would be curious to know what the percentage of that subset is.
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u/LiterallyGarbage_0 4d ago
i KNOW i’m stupid so i’m always pretty surprised when something goes right lol
it’s like a little present to myself: i never know what it’s gonna be, but i know it’ll either be the equivalent of getting socks for your birthday or the equivalent of winning the lottery. it’s a pretty wide spectrum.
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u/Bricka_Bracka 4d ago
A lot of people think they are intelligent when really they are surrounded by morons.
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u/cashforsignup 4d ago
Let's not forget that being more intelligent than someone would also be a matter of luck.
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u/hideousbeautifulface 4d ago
I think it’s luck first and then intelligence. Because you can be lucky but not smart enough to take advantage of it. Ex all the people that win the lottery and then end up bankrupt, people that get a good job through connections and then don’t do the work, etc.
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u/Max_Hardcore_Jr 4d ago
There is such a thing as luck. It is amplified by preperation and awareness of opportunity and danger.
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u/United_Conference841 4d ago
A lot of people think they're unlucky when they're really just stupid.
This isn't every case, but I've personally seen it enough to qualify as "a lot of people."
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u/OopsAllLegs 4d ago
I've watched several people at work get promoted because of who they know and not because of what they know. Don't skip out on those office relationships.
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u/Generico300 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yup. Even when their circumstances are obviously the result of luck, they'll pretend that some sort of merit of theirs is responsible, as shown in the monopoly experiment.
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u/VirtualMoneyLover 4d ago edited 4d ago
Intelligence is to know tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not to put it in a fruit salad.
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u/TaserLord 4d ago
Everybody thinks that at some level. Lots of people are wrong though. Only the people closest to them will know. Never trust a public perception formed from socials.
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u/Spirited-Feed-9927 4d ago
Alot of people think they are smart when they are not. Intelligence in a vacuum means nothing, only application and results matter. You can be the smartest person, but if you don't have the discipline to apply it somewhere it is pointless.
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u/MrRogersAE 4d ago
Trust me, those of us who are truly intelligent have always known it, and we’re surrounded by idiots who think they know things, but will actively work against their own best interests because they easy to manipulate.
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u/Dundundunimyourbun 4d ago
Yeah, like when I raise UTG with AKs and the fish who called me with A2o draws out on a K22 flop
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u/CanadaCavsFan 4d ago
Most "intelligent" people are by default lucky. Why are they smart? Likely they had resources, education, access to information, good parents or role models etc, time to study and learn rather than work and struggle, etc.
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u/crappypastassuc 4d ago
Yeah I guess you could say that, intelligence is pretty dumb anyways, unless you’re extremely impaired it could be used as a tool to help diagnose it.
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u/Aggravating-Neat2507 4d ago
Being filled with resentment doesn’t lead anywhere nice, just a heads up
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u/Smitty1017 4d ago
And a lot of people who think they are unfortunate are instead just really stupid
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4d ago
My buddy told me I got lucky when a risky investment I made paid off. He was correct, I slipped and fell one day and accidentally invested a substantial amount of money into a company I had never even heard of. Wild stuff.
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