What is Success?

I recently stumbled upon a video titled “Is Success Luck or Hard Work?” by the famous YouTube channel, Veritasium. I loved the premise of the video. It is something that I have thought about in the past, and the video connected to me so well!

In the video Derek Muller goes through various examples, but particularly one of them caught my eye. The astronaut selection simulation. It is basically a simulation that he carried out based on how NASA astronauts are selected via an intensive training program.
The problem is stated as follows:

“Consider the most recent class of NASA astronauts. From over 18,300 applicants in 2017, only 11 were selected and went on to graduate from the astronaut training program. Now we can make a toy model of the selection process - let’s say the astronauts are selected mostly based on their skill, experience and hard work, but also say five percent as a result of luck - fortunate circumstances.”

Then, he goes on to simulate the whole situation. For each applicant, he randomly generates a skill score out of a hundred, and a luck score out of a hundred. The skill and luck scores are weighted and added in the 95-5 ratio to get an overall score. This final score represents the selector’s judgements, meaning the top 11 by this metric would become astronauts. Then he proceeds to repeat the simulation a 1000 times and averages the individual luck scores of the selected individuals.
The average value turns out to be around 95. That means, almost all of the selected individuals had a very high luck score. He further goes on to say that based on only skill, about 1.6 of those 11 astronauts would have graduated.

The above simulation shows a very peculiar but explainable outcome. We often disregard the impact of luck in a given situation, but think of the number of candidates that may have had a very high skill score, almost 98 or 99 out of a hundred, but still didn’t get selected because of their low luck scores. It is a reflection of what really happens in the society. There are very highly talented and hardworking individuals who never get the chance to live up to their potential (or reap the benefits of their skills) because they aren’t lucky.

The simulation (rather the results presented) felt a bit incomplete to me. There are many more things that could’ve been done and probably were left because it was a small simulation for a much larger video. Thus, I have decided to replicate the simulation and look a bit deeper into it. I’ll keep you all posted about it. Till then, take care, bubyee…