37-成功由命定？好运从哪来？

THE MOST CONTENTIOUS question in business is whether success comes from luck or skill. What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages. Warren Buffett famously considers himself a "member of the lucky sperm club" and a winner of the "ovarian Lottery". Jeff Bezos attributes Amazons success to an" incredible planetary alignment" and jokes that it was"half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains." Bill Gates even goes so far as to claim that he"was lucky to be born with certain skills, " though it's not clear whether that's actually possible.

Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble. However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance. Hundreds of people have started multiple multimillion-dollar businesses. A few, like Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk, have created several multibillion-dollar companies. If success were mostly a matter of luck, these kinds of serial entrepreneurs probably wouldn't exist.

In january 2015. Jack Dorsey founder of Twitter and square, tweeted to his 2 million followers: "Success is never accidental." Most of the replies were unambiguously negative. Referencing the tweet in The Atlantic, reporter Alexis Madrigal wrote that his instinct was to reply: "Success is never accidental, said all multimillionaire white men." It's true that already successful people have an easier time doing new things, whether due to their networks,
wealth, or experience. But perhaps we've become too quick to dismiss anyone who claims to have succeeded according to plan.

Is there a way to settle this debate objectively? Unfortunately not, because companies are not experiments. To get a scientific answer about Facebook, for example, we'd have to rewind to 2004, create 1,000 copies of the world, and start Facebook in each copy to see how many times it would succeed. But that experiment is impossible. Every company starts in unique circumstances, and every company starts only once. Statistics doesn't work when the sample size is one.

From the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the mid-20th century, luck was something to be mastered, dominated, and controlled; everyone agreed that you should do what you could, not focus on what you couldnt. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this ethos when he wrote: Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances. Strong men believe in cause and effect. In 1912, after he became the first explorer to reach the South Pole, Roald Amundsen wrote: " Victory awaits him who has everything in order- luck, people call it. No one pretended that misfortune didnt exist, but prior generations believed in making their own luck by working hard.

If you believe your life is mainly a matter of chance, why read this book? Learning about startups is worthless if you‘re just reading stories about people who won the lottery. Slot Machines for Dummies can purport to tell you which kind of rabbit's foot to rub or how to tell which machines are "hot, but it can’t tell you how to win". Did Bil Gates simply win the intelligence lottery? Was Sheryl Sandberg born with a silver spoon, or did she"lean in"? When we debate historical questions like these, luck is in the past tense. Far more important are questions about the future: is it a matter of chance or design.

词

contentious adj. 诉讼的；有异议的，引起争论的；爱争论的

patchwork n. 拼缝物；拼布手艺

arbitrary adj. [数] 任意的；武断的；专制的

ovarian adj. [解剖] 卵巢的；子房的

lottery n. 彩票

sperm club 精子俱乐部

Renaissance 文艺复兴

Enlightenment 启蒙运动

purport vt. 声称；意图；意指；打算

中文

界最有争议的问题是—成功是靠运气还是靠技能?成功人士怎么说呢?马尔科姆·格拉德威尔,一位写成功人士传记的畅销书作家,在他的书《异类》中说成功源于运气和偶然的优势”。沃伦·巴菲特认为自己是“幸运精子俱乐部里的一员”,是“卵巢彩票”的嬴家。杰夫·贝佐斯把亚马逊的成功看成与“行星连珠”一样令人难以置信,而且还开玩笑地说这成功靠的“一半是运气,一半是时机,剩下的则是智慧”。比尔·盖茨甚至宣称自己“太幸运了,生来就具有一定的技能”，虽然这是否可能还不清楚。

也许这些人出于交际策略或多或少有些谦虚,但是这种连续创业的企业家精神是对“机遇创造成功”理论的质疑。已经有成百上千的人开创了市值数百万美元的企业。少数一些,如史蒂夫·乔布斯、杰克·多西和埃隆·马斯克,甚至连续创立了几家价值数十亿美元的公司。如果成功来源于运气,那这些连续创业者们也许就不会存在了。

2013年1月,推特和 Square的创始人杰克·多西在推特上向其200万关注者发表推文:《成功绝非偶然》这种说法顿时引来噓声一片。《大西洋月刊》上,记者亚历克西斯·马徳加格尔说他的第一反应是反驳:“所有白人巨富都会说成功绝非偶然。”的确,已经成功的人涉足新领域要容易一些,不管是因为他们的网络效应、财富,还是丰富的经验。但也许,是我们自己太快地否定了那种按计划一步一步获得成功的可能性。

有没有办法客观地平息这场争论?不幸的是,没有。因为公司并不是实验室。例如要想通过科学实验来回答 Facebook是否会成功,我们就必须倒回到2004年,复制出1000个世界,然后在每个世界里运营 Facebook,看看结果到底怎样。但是做这个实验是不可能的。每个公司都在特定的环境中起步,每个公司也都只有一次生存的机会。如果样本只有一个,得出的数据是没有说服力的。

从文艺复兴、启蒙运动到20世纪中期,运气是可以被掌握支配的;大家都认为一个人应该做力所能及的事,而不是纠结于做不到的事。拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生捕捉到了这种社会思潮,他写道:“浅薄的人才会相信运气和境遇……强者只相信因果。”1912年,罗尔德·阿蒙森成为第一个探索南极的人,他说:“胜利只等待那些有准备的人,也许这就是人们说的运气吧!”没有人会假装坏运气不存在,但是前辈们相信努力会换来好运气。

如果你相信人生就是靠运气,那为什么还要读这本书呢?如果你只想知道彩票大奖得主的故事,学习创业对于你来说就毫无用处。《傻瓜老虎机使用指南》可能会告诉你哪些吉祥物可以求
得好运,哪种机器“最神”,但是不能告诉你成功的方法。难道比尔·盖茨只是中了智力彩票?难道谢丽尔·桑德伯格本来就含着金汤匙出生,或是她“向前一步”了?当我们讨论像这样的历史问题时,幸运已是过去时了。更重要的问题是关于未来的:未来是靠机遇还是计划呢?

（①桑德伯格著有《向前一步》一书,她召唤女性在事业上积极进取,敢于争取女性的领导地位。该书简体中文版已由中信出版社于2013年6月出版。—译者注）