Here is a fun thought experiment. In any zero sum game there will be a Warren Buffet. And people will follow him or her around asking for their advice and writing books on it while ignoring all the people who did exactly the same thing that lost everything.

So for the experiment it’s a coin flipping championship with millions of participants. Heads you win and move on, tails you lose. All the coins are the same and totally fair. Someone will win far more than everyone else. People will follow this person around, invite them to speak publicly, write books, and so on. If they fail to understand the world properly they’ll buy into it and even tell people their secret to flipping coins successfully.

Thats an incomplete thought experiment for this topic and and in my mind it makes it invalid. Even your own followup statement (which i agree with) negates your thought experiment.

Don’t be fooled by randomness. Instead motivate against bad luck and position yourself to exploit good luck.

I agree with this but this is the opposite of your thought experiment.

I think of more of the concept of good luck (and bad for that matter) are harvested. If you make choices create conditions in your life that will give you more coin flips that others on both good and bad luck. If you get a college degree, you will have options to flip the coin for opportunities that require a college degree. If you don’t have the degree you don’t even get the chance to flip the coin. Keep in mind, I’m not saying getting a degree will absolutely lead to success. No of course not, but if the particular lucky opportunity in front of two people requires a degree and one person has it and the other doesn’t. The degree-less person doesn’t even have the chance at the luck.

The same thing occurs with bad luck. If you hang out with people that shoplift, even if you don’t, you run the risk of being unlucky enough to have to flip the coin when to be accused of shoplifting because of the actions of those around you. It doesn’t mean you’ll absolutely get charged with shoplifted even if you did nothing, but the chance increases that you will.

The article even covers lots of this for those that didn’t read it. Mackie wasn’t just some guy off the street that landed an MCU role. He did a WHOLE BUNCH OF THINGS that gave him more chances at luck.

• After graduating from the prestigious Juilliard School in 2001
• he performed in both on- and Off-Broadway productions
• and in Academy award-winning films, like 2008’s "The Hurt Locker."
• he worked his ass of acting: Mackie estimates he “put in 10,750 hours of training” before landing that life-changing job.
• He was proactive, too: He wrote letters to executives at Disney’s Marvel Studios over a decade ago in the hopes of landing a role in one of the studio’s popular superhero films,

Each one of these things and dozens more were his hard work that gave him more chances to flip the good luck coin. So while its true that someone else could have done all of these exact same things and still not succeeded where Mackie did, had Mackie not done these things it is highly likely he would never have become an actor we know of today.

So put the hard work into giving yourself more chances of flipping the “good luck coin” and few chances to flip the “bad luck coin”.