>>I'm saying that my success cannot be solely attributed to my hard work. If you include the genetic lottery (including not just to whom, but where and when I was
>>born) under luck, then I'm sure that my actions have been less important than my luck. If I'd been born 100 years earlier, or in the 3rd world, odds are I'd have
>>been lucky to learn to get much of an education, let alone college and grad school. Even one generation earlier, had I gotten pregnant in grad school as I did, I
>>might have been out on my butt. So many people and so many things contributed to my opportunity to do the thing I love.
>
>This article on "luck" and randomness in social life in a country that cherishes self-made men - and women of course - is of course significant. Why? IMHO Because it possibly challenges some of the very traditional values of America.
>
>In a sense, doesn't bring additional evidence to the fact that the US has changed a tad. It used to be a place where success was something you should but also you COULD build on your own. Is is still that place? I reckon not in the way it used to be. Another way in which the American Exception is not exactly what it used to be. Call it normalization? Well possibly.
>

I actually think the idea that could build success totally on your own was always a myth. There's a reason the settlers went west in groups (wagon trains)--they were a lot more likely to survive that way.


>Is America a place where you simply cannot challenge destiny with hard word? Certainly not, of course. And there are quite a number of places of in the world where the feeling is that LUCK MAY BE THE ONLY WAY to decent success. In theses places you'd have to challenge people for them to accept this assumption that luck (especially at birth...) is the only solution and introducing yourself as a "self-made" person is somewhat offensive since you should never forget the massive luck you got.
>

I don't believe anyone in the modern world has ever been "self-made" in the sense of succeeding only on their own efforts. Certainly, some people are better at identifying those who can help them and at taking advantage of that help. But everyone builds on the efforts of those who came before them.

I do agree that there are places where the role of luck is much more important than in the US (or in France or elsewhere in the West), but isn't that actually a way of saying that being born in the West is the first stroke of luck?

Tamar