Nope, There's No Success Playbook. No Hard Work Guarantees Results

Whether it’s my blog, newsletter, or talks I give at universities, I’ve been sharing knowledge for years. And there’s one problem I’ve never been able to shake: everyone wants a success playbook, a definite guide.

But I genuinely can’t say “just do X and you’ll definitely get Y.”

People come to me for career advice hoping I’ll tell them: “Learn SQL and Python and you’ll become a data scientist.” Or: “Improve your English and you’ll land a job at a global company with a better salary.”

I can’t say any of those things. Not because I’m being modest — I just don’t believe them.

I do all these things myself. I code, learn AI tools, study, and read data analysis case studies every day. But I’ve never once thought that doing all this guarantees I’ll reach those glossy career goals. Every time I stand in front of a roomful of hopeful university students, I have one thought I can never actually say out loud:

If I actually said that, who would ever listen to me? ಠ_ಠ

This is the tension I’ve been living with. Writing this post is my attempt to finally work through it.

Where Do “Success Formulas” Come From?

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Browse any business bestseller list and you’ll find legendary CEOs sharing their “10 Decision Principles” and star investors revealing their “5 Mental Models.” It all implies that if you’re smart enough, work hard enough, think far enough ahead, and calculate your every move — success is inevitable.

Nope. It’s not that simple.

I recently read Vincent’s post about a paper where economist Armen Alchian challenged this exact idea back in 1950. In Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, he proposed that the market works like a giant filter. It doesn’t reward the smartest businesses. Instead, it eliminates the ones that can’t adapt. The “winners” you see are often just survivors who happened to be standing in the spotlight, not people with some rare gift for seeing the future.

Put simply: the people who look successful now had no way of knowing they’d succeed when they started (though every single one of them believed they would).

The irony is what happens after success. People celebrate them, reverse-engineer a tidy set of “brilliant decisions,” write heroic stories — and genuinely believe that’s why they won.

Alchian illustrated this with a gas station example. Imagine thousands of entrepreneurs randomly building gas stations all over a city — no market research, no data. A year later, the road network changes. The stations near the new main roads make a fortune. The ones on dead-end streets close down.

Now go interview the profitable owners. What do you think they’ll say?

“I saw the potential of this location from the start.”

And everyone who hears that thinks: “Wow, this person has a real business sense.”

But that’s probably not what happened. It’s just human narrative instinct at work. We love stories with clean cause-and-effect. Our brains struggle to accept “he got lucky”. We need to formulate the story as “he made smart moves, and therefore blablabla…”

Go interview the owners who built on the dead-end streets and they’ll tell you:

“I genuinely thought this spot had potential…” (´Д` )

That’s where success formulas come from: we only hear from the people who made it. The ones who didn’t just… disappear.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Luck Explains Success Better Than Talent

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If Alchian’s argument feels too theoretical, a research team at the University of Catania went further. They actually simulated a society to watch how talent and luck interact to determine success. The paper, Talent vs Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure, won the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize in Economics.

The setup is straightforward. 1,000 virtual agents, each with a different talent score following a normal distribution. Most people are roughly average, with very few at either extreme. These agents run through a simulated 40-year career, randomly encountering two types of events:

• Green dots (lucky events): A chance to double your wealth — but higher-talent agents have a better shot at actually capitalizing on it
  • This models how talented people are better at seizing opportunities when they appear
• Red dots (unlucky events): Wealth gets cut in half, regardless of talent
  • No amount of talent protects you from illness, accidents, or things outside your control

What happened at the end of the simulation? The wealthiest agents were almost never the most talented ones.

The top earner was typically someone with average talent who happened to dodge red dots and hit a string of green ones. Highly talented agents who ran into several red dots ended up with almost nothing. Surviving matters more than being talented — sound familiar after reading about Alchian?

This explains a real-world puzzle: human talent follows a normal distribution, but wealth doesn’t. It follows a power law, where the top 20% hold 80% of the wealth. That gap? Most of it comes down to luck.

If we’re being honest about what drives success, luck matters far more than talent or effort. People don’t like this idea because it takes away the feeling that life is in our control.

And does this mean effort or hard-working is pointless? That we should all just give up?

Well, No.

Effort Is Like Buying a Lottery Ticket, Not a Guarantee

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After working through all this, I’ve landed on a framing I can actually make peace with: effort is buying a lottery ticket.

Winning (getting a big reward) still depends on timing, environment, and a fair bit of luck. Effort lets you buy more tickets and keep buying them longer — which steadily improves your odds. But it doesn’t guarantee you win.

And here’s the part that really matters: you don’t even know if you’re buying the right lottery.

The direction you pick is part luck too. The field you choose, the skills you invest in, the hours you put in — even if all of that feels like the most rational decision given what you know right now, it can still become irrelevant when the environment shifts. Nobody can guarantee their direction is right when they start.

Ten years ago, software engineering looked like the safest bet. High salaries, massive job demand. Students flooded into computer science programs, many heading to the US for master’s degrees and PhDs. They were working hard and making rational, well-reasoned decisions based on what the market looked like at the time.

Then, here came ChatGPT.

Anxiety about AI replacing programmers spread fast. Tech layoffs rolled in. Hiring slowed or stopped entirely. These students who’d invested everything into software engineering suddenly found the door closed.

Did they do something wrong? No. Were they not working hard enough? Also no.

They bought a lottery ticket, and the rules changed before the drawing.

That’s why I can’t say “do X and you’ll get Y.” The statement is logically broken. There’s just no success formula, and there’s no success science.

If there’s one real danger to blindly believing effort always pays off, it’s not the effort itself — it’s the wrong expectations it creates. If you genuinely believe hard work guarantees results, then when the results don’t come, you don’t just feel disappointed. You start questioning your own ability. You wonder if any of it was worth it. That collapse is often harder to recover from than the original setback.

Effort isn’t the problem. What needs adjusting is what you expect effort to deliver.

Working Hard Every Day, Hoping for Tomorrow

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I practice this myself.

I put real effort into every post I write: gathering evidence, tracking down sources, revising when readers give feedback, editing draft after draft. My blog doesn’t get huge traffic. I don’t expect any single post to shift how people think or get noticed by the right people.

The reason I can keep writing is that I’ve practiced not tying my motivation to getting rewarded.

Because if I did — if getting rewarded was my fuel — then the days with low traffic would feel like proof that none of it mattered. That disappointment would kill my will to keep going. I don’t want that to happen.

So I treat each post like a lottery ticket. I write it, put it out there, and let go. If today’s ticket doesn’t hit, that’s fine. Tomorrow I write another one. That’ll be another ticket in. I always believe the next one might win. Working hard every day, hoping for something new each morning.

That’s not the same as giving up. It’s how I make effort sustainable.

This is just my personal philosophy — definitely not universal truth. If you believe hard work always pays off, you might be right, and honestly, I’d kind of envy you.

References:

• Armen A. Alchian, Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory (1950)
• Alessandro Pluchino et al., Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure (2018)
• Humility Is Not Surrender — Vincent Cheng-Wen Yu