Contributions of Talent, Perspective, Context and Luck to Success

TL;DR

This study uses a simulated competitive environment based on Risk to quantitatively analyze how talent, context, perspective, and luck influence success, revealing the relative importance of each factor.

Contribution

It introduces a controlled simulation framework that disaggregates the roles of talent, context, and perspective in success, providing new insights into their individual impacts.

Findings

Luck, talent, and context all significantly influence success.

Perspective as the goal definition does not impact success.

Resilience and opportunity are also important factors.

Abstract

We propose a controlled simulation within a competitive sum-zero environment as a proxy for disaggregating components of success. Given a simulation of the Risk board game, we consider (a) Talent to be one of three rule-based strategies used by players; (b) Context as the setting of each run of the game with opponents' strategies, goals and luck; and (c) Perspective as the objective of each player. Success is attained when a first player conquers its goal. We simulate 100,000 runs of an agent-based model and analyze the results. The simulation results strongly suggest that luck, talent and context are all relevant to determine success. Perspective -- as the description of the goal that defines success -- is not. As such, we present a quantitative, reproducible environment in which we are able to significantly separate the concepts, reproducing previous results of the literature and adding arguments for context and perspective. Finally, we also find that the simulation offers insights on the relevance of resilience and opportunity.