Is it better to be Lucky or Smart?
 

discuss........

I see smart people fall and dumb people thrive. which do you belive to be more profitable.

Also I don't see sucessfull lucky people, smart people suceed.

Over the short term > lucky
Over the long term > smart

:2 cents:

Even if you are very smart, without a little luck here and there the ladder to success is slippery.

I'd take an extra can of luck over more smarts any day.

Depends what makes you "smart". But I'd take smart anyday.

You make your own luck.

I don;t think lucky people are successfull. They didn't "earn" it.

I also believe with the right amount of inteligence you will know which ladders aren't so slippery, or you'll remember to take a towel along with you. :winkwink:

maybe you could say that some people are lucky to be smart.

There are 700 Billionaires in the world. There are 1 Billion smart people.

Next. :1orglaugh

Smart just means knowing when you've been lucky -- that's optimal.

smart people can achieve anything as much as possible

okay, so let's say that 350 of those billionaires are smart and 350 are lucky. which would you rather be? one of the smart ones or one of the lucky ones?

thank you, i believe the same

Being lucky is more fun. So I'll take lucky.

One of the reasons I'm stuck on this point is it reminds me of when I went to my high school reunion. All the really smart kids that everyone thought were going to be so successful in life turned out to have done ok, but nothing stellar. The most successful who had really accomplished something unique and made the most money turned out to be average students that were lucky by being in the right place at the right time with that lucky "big hit" opportunity.

Maybe one should distinguish smart from being intelligent. Maybe thats what made the difference in "real life" success between the average student and the intellectual highflyers KRL mentioned.

I believe one can force his luck (at least to a certain degree) by being smart. Being "just" intelligent scares off luck sometimes.

Just my 2cents

lucky dumbass 4 life!

I find myself always wishing i had more luck, so i would take that. Ignorance is bliss anyway.

anyone who is older than 16 would realise it is the othery way around for more than obvious reasons



ask the unlucky rich dude who's wive died of cancer and who's only kid has leukemia

Yeah ask Stephen Hawkings how cool it is to be smart.

Well since luck isnt really real id take smart anyday.

Luck runs out so I'd rather be smart if I had to choose between the two. But some luck is needed to parlay smarts into success.

Mike Tyson was lucky to be born with the raw skills to be a dominant boxer, and he was lucky to be discovered and trained to utilize his skill. It made him millions of dollars, but he wasn't smart enough to be able to keep that money.

In the real world it seems that smart doesn't mean being an "A" student in college. It seems to be equated with those who have more money than others. Therefore in that view, I think smart means being able to take advantage of simple opportunities as they come by and realize their benefits or potential benefits.

Not everybody involved in the internet in 1994-1996 are millionaires today. Some people saw the benefits while others didn't.

As somebody mentioned earlier, being intelligent or a genius may not lend itself to financial success. Mark Twain, Einstein, Joseph Conrad, many of the great philosophers, many of the researchers discovering new cures and treatments, many of the scientific thinkers of the past, weren't rich and a number of them died as poppers or were hated, undervalued, and misunderstood in their own time.

On the flip side, luck is very important because some people are lucky to be born with better brains and born into better families and better countries than others.

I think you make your own luck, what most see as luck is consistency that finally pans out.

That's a sad way of looking at it, but true :(

It's better to be lucky..smart you can work at.

lucky, of course, but more important, is to be happy, if you were to choose only one attribute.

Its better to be smart and very lucky :))
2kandah nice sig, btw

Luck has nothing to do with it.

to be extremely well off i would say both ;)

no such thing as luck...thats only an excuse for some ppl

Luck? I guess he was traning hard, harder than his opponents, it made him better. Simple as that.

It's lucky to be smart.

Bad luck can happen to anyone, no matter how smart or hardworking. Being smart can help minimize the damage though, and working hard can help you recover more quickly. :2 cents:

You will always remain smart, the same can not be said about lucky.

Being smart brings you closer to luck and countless opportunities. :thumbsup

I think luck and good karma from having good intentions and not being an asswipe go hand in hand.

Genetics too... he was born stronger than others. I can never punch as hard as him no matter how much training I have. Some people are born big, others small. Some mentally challenged, others with exceptional intelligence. Some are born with computers, others in barren deserts. That's what I mean by luck which is why I think a combination of luck and smarts is optimal.

I think that you are really smart, you can create your own luck

Smart people create their own luck, take an idiot to just call luck luck. Only idiots and jealous people see preparedness as luck.

lucky ...................

I'd say that people who think that people are successful only because of luck use it as an excuse. To say luck is a component of success is just an acknowledgement of the obvious. There are always things out of people's control.... that your parents don't abort you when you're a child, that you're attractive or ugly by society's standards, that your brain is functional etc.

SMART... luck is temporary but smartness last a lifetime

Well, lets forget abortion, but all those other things are not positive and negative. You can gain from everything. No matter big, small, ugly, good looking, etc you are, you can be sucessful. If you are working smart, you dont need any luck.

genetics, of course...but all big boxers have a good genetics, the ones who dont, mostly dont start with such a sport and concentrate on other things.

"Everything in life is luck."

Donald Trump

That's a great perspective to take and for the most part I subscribe to it too, and it's something I would tell my kids, but I know that it's not completely true. You can minimize negative things, and yes those things are negative and positive, but you can't always eliminate things.

Every single successful person that I know or have read about including those in the Ambush Interviews on this board, to Trump to Rockefeller have talked about a thing called Luck in their memoirs. Luck doesn't reduce work load because all of those people worked extremely hard and worked smart. Luck just provided them with certain opportunities. In show biz they call it the 'big break'.

I'm lucky to have been interested in computers when I was a kid. This made it easier for me to get acquinted with the internet when the internet came along. I didn't know the internet was going to come along but it did and I'm also lucky it was invented when it was. If it was invented sooner or later, some opportunities I had would have been missed. It's just dumb luck.

Even being able to work smart is partly due to luck.... luck that your brain is normal. Somebody with less mental capacity can't do what you can do. I can never be Einstein.


I think this sums it up and is what successful people have been telling us throughout the ages.

There should have been a third option: good-looking.

I've seen way too many people who were both unlucky and dumb as stumps, but they get by somehow on their good looks. A lot of people are inherently shallow and reward good looks rather than brains or merit.

If you're lucky then you don't have to worry about people fucking you over for not being smart, because your luck covers your ass on that.

Of course if you'd said lucky and stupid, I don't think I'd want to go down that path. Lucky and average, sure.

If you're smart and poor, you end up being one of them cranky failures who has no friends and bitches about everything.

All of those people who are succesful, are succesful for a reason. Its not only they worked hard or smart, but they thought positive, they had a goal and couldnt imagine to fail. I know ppl who were working harder than me, maybe also smarter, but they didnt have any real goals and were laughing at mine, because they were huge. Well, I reached my goals, they didnt have any succes. Luck had nothing to do with it. I say, set a goal, think optimistic and work on it. Succes will come, no matter what.

Funny, I've had this happen to me first-hand. If you put things like that, sure, I guess you can run into a streak of bad luck every now and then, coincidences do happen. However, my statement was more in relation to the myth of luck being base for success. It's been said by others in this thread, smart people create their own luck, they don't wait for it to happen.

Smart, at least, if by that you mean intelligent.

Luck may make you a millionaire, but it doesn't allow you to experience the pleasure of reading Crime and Punishment, The Man Without Qualities, Fathers and Sons, etc.

I classify being goal oriented as working smart. It's like saying that everybody can achieve what they want if they try hard enough but it's not always true. You and I will never get babes based on our looks the same way Brad Pitt will. Because we were born with different looks. That's just luck.

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
Smarts = Genetics + Hard Work

Smarts are great and I'm glad to have them. The one thing I could use a little more of is luck.

Great thread, revived my faith in people on GFY. You guys are a smart and lucky bunch.