Why Do Many Highly Successful People Always Attribute Their Success to Luck?

@BaiYeiXing: Once you get to know a few truly capable people, you'll realize something hard to understand.

And that is, the heights these people have reached are simply not heights that can be attained by hard work alone.

When I first graduated, I also thought that as long as I worked hard, I could reach the pinnacle of life.

I thought that as long as I kept striving, I could become the dragon-slaying warrior, the vanguard scaling the tower.

Facts proved, that was total bullshit.

To be honest, hard work is merely an indispensable part of the process of becoming a capable person.

But if you truly believe it is the most important thing, it shows you are not actually a capable person.

Let me give you a very simple example.

I had a client who originally sold bedding, like four-piece sets, along with some other things.

A few years ago, he wanted to expand into the European market, so he spent a fortune upgrading his craftsmanship and purchasing raw materials. The factory was newly rented, the equipment newly bought, the raw materials newly stocked, and he even specifically hired engineers from Germany to debug the production line.

Everything was ready, just waiting to start production.

Then a typhoon hit. It was as if the typhoon was coming straight for him.

The roof of his new factory was completely blown off. The equipment was soaked in water, the raw materials were soaked in water, and the production line, which had just been debugged and hadn't officially started operating, became a pile of scrap metal.

What was the most messed up part? The insurance procedures for his new factory's production line hadn't been completed yet. Just a few days short—just a few days—and the insurance wasn't active. All the money he had invested and borrowed from the bank, several million, just went down the drain.

When he told me about this, the expression on his face wasn't anger, nor sadness; it was an indescribable sense of absurdity.

His face faintly revealed the words "what a joke." You want to curse someone, but you don't know who to curse. You can't curse God; God never begged you to open a factory.

There was nothing he could do.

Fortunately, he had made some money before. He took out all his savings, took out another loan, rebuilt the factory, bought the equipment again, and restocked the raw materials.

He told me that during that time, he couldn't sleep at night. Not because of the immense pressure, but because the moment he closed his eyes, he saw that blown-off roof.

The factory was built, the equipment was adjusted, and this time he bought insurance. Everything seemed to finally be on the right track.

But who could have guessed? There were no more orders.

For various reasons, the European clients' orders shrank drastically. The four-piece sets he produced were boxed up and piled in the warehouse, unsellable.

He went to domestic clients, but they said his were export specifications and they didn't want them. He looked for other channels but found it impossible to break in.

Just like that, the factory went completely bankrupt. He was drowning in debt. His house, car, and everything sellable in his home were all sold. His wife had just given birth to their second child, who was still nursing. They lived in a rented house and couldn't even afford a decent crib.

So he came up with a plan: a fake divorce. He intended to transfer all the assets under his name to his wife, so that at least the creditors wouldn't touch his wife and child's things.

Although there weren't many assets left, having something was better than nothing. When he said this, his tone was very flat, as if he were talking about what he had for lunch. Yet, there was an uncontrollable bitterness on his face.

But the divorce didn't happen in the end. Not because his wife disagreed, but because his father-in-law disagreed.

He had never really thought highly of his father-in-law. His father-in-law was a chief physician at a local hospital, a decent status, but still slightly inferior compared to his previous business.

Moreover, this father-in-law had a quirk: he always put on a very aloof and self-righteous front. The phrase he always had on his lips was, "I have never given a bribe or taken a bribe in my life; I've been clean my whole life."

When they first met, he still respected him. But after hearing it so much, he said he felt like laughing later on, thinking the old man was just stubborn. He had the ability and connections but didn't know how to use them. If he had been willing to network a bit, he probably would have become the hospital director long ago.

Because of this, his relationship with his father-in-law had never been great; it was a mutual dislike. He thought his father-in-law was pedantic, and his father-in-law thought he was boastful. During holiday meals, the two of them would bicker from start to finish.

So when he told his father-in-law about the fake divorce, he thought the old man was going to get on his high horse again, and he almost got into a fight with him. But his father-in-law said something he would never forget for the rest of his life.

It wasn't a quarrel, nor a lecture.

His father-in-law said, "If you do this, there's no turning back. You think you're protecting them, but you're pushing the whole family to a dead end. As long as you have a breath left, figure out a way to catch it. Your parents, my daughter, my grandson—they are all standing behind you. Turn around and look."

Then his father-in-law took out all his savings. A lifetime of savings for a hospital's chief physician wasn't a lot, but it was enough for him to catch his breath.

Furthermore, his father-in-law leveraged his connections at the hospital and secured an order for him to make surgical gowns and surgical outerwear, covering a county's supply for a whole year.

He said he dropped to his knees in front of his father-in-law right then and there.

Because his father-in-law had worked at the local hospital for over half his life and had saved countless people. Many hospital leaders were his former students, so his interpersonal relationships played a role at this moment.

After that, he partnered with someone to fulfill that hospital order. The partner was in charge of the equipment, and he was in charge of the raw materials.

But after he finished purchasing the raw materials, he came back to find the partner had vanished. The guy had run off with the money meant for the equipment. Perhaps he felt the order wasn't profitable enough to be worth the hassle.

At that moment, he stood alone in the empty factory, with the newly purchased raw materials in front of him and a mountain of debt behind him.

He told me that at that moment, he genuinely just wanted to die. Not out of despair, but out of exhaustion. It’s the kind of feeling where you've used every ounce of your strength, only to find another mountain ahead. You climb over one, and there's another. You climb a hundred, look up, and damn it, there are still mountains everywhere.

At that point, he truly had no idea what to do.

How does fate toy with people? Right at that moment, the pandemic hit.

Logically, he had absolutely zero connection to medical supplies; after all, he used to make bedding, and making surgical gowns for hospitals was a first for him.

But if that were truly the case, he wouldn't be where he is today.

Among the raw materials he bought for the surgical gowns and protective suits, by a twist of fate, there was something called melt-blown fabric.

I didn't know what melt-blown fabric was back then either. If he hadn't told me, I probably would have gone my whole life without knowing.

Just to give you some context, melt-blown fabric is the core filtration layer of masks. Without this layer, a mask is just a piece of cloth.

When the pandemic struck, the price of melt-blown fabric skyrocketed from ten to twenty thousand RMB per ton to hundreds of thousands per ton. At its craziest, there was a price but no market; even if you had the money, you couldn't buy it.

And he had eight tons.

Eight tons of melt-blown fabric, with a cost of 130,000 RMB. How much did he sell it for? Over four million. Just from that one batch, over four million.

With that four million plus, he invested in various projects during the pandemic.

In less than two years, his net worth had reached the level of a billionaire.

But the story doesn't end there.

In the year after the pandemic started, his father-in-law was taken away by the disciplinary inspection commission.

At first, he didn't know what it was about. Later, he found out that to secure that batch of surgical gown orders back then, his father-in-law had done some things. Perhaps due to a lack of experience, or maybe it was destiny, he got caught that one and only time.

I asked him, "Is it serious?" He said it wasn't very serious, nothing major, and he was later released on medical parole.

It's just that after being released on medical parole, his health quickly deteriorated. Within half a year, he passed away.

So when he told me all this, he said something: he said his current wealth and status were traded for his father-in-law's life. I went to visit his father-in-law's grave with him; he spent millions on it, but that's a story for another time.

Returning to the original question.

Why do those truly capable people always attribute their success to luck?

It's not because they are being modest, nor because they are pretending. It's because they have truly seen too many things beyond their control. They have witnessed natural disasters and man-made calamities; they have seen people lose everything overnight, and they have seen people strike it rich overnight.

They know that what they can actually do in the midst of all this is very little. Hard work is certainly important; without it, you can't even get in the door. But once you're in? Whether you can survive, whether you can succeed, whether you can catch that gust of wind—none of these are things you can decide.

Those who believe they succeeded purely through hard work have mostly never experienced true, massive storms.

You learned to swim in a pool, so you think you can take on the ocean.

When you actually get into the ocean and a wave crashes over you, you realize that your survival isn't because you swim well, but because you weren't killed by that wave.

Unfortunately, you never know where the next wave will hit you from. You can only pray that you have the strength to withstand the next wave.

If you don't have the strength, then you can only hope that the wave is there to carry you to the cusp of the wind.