WARNING: DIFFICULT CONTENT AHEAD!
We're not 11 weeks out from the English exam, and the evil voices in my head tell me I should probably start amping up the difficulty for you guys, so without further ado, I present you with a piece that has a
very difficult contention! It's also
very long. But trust me when I say this is for your own good -
if your exam isn't comparative this year, my guess is that there'll be one long and rather difficult piece instead. As such, if you manage to get through the hard stuff sooner rather than later, it'll mean the exam is far less likely to take you by surprise.
Usual rules apply: you can use this week's material to test your abilities to select content, or general analytical skills, but even if you just want to write ~100 words unpacking the author's point of view, I'd consider that a success. Just practise what you need to practise!
No real background information this week; it's just a piece published in an online magazine. No specific target audience, no specific spark. Good luck!
Judged on merit, you better be lucky
How important is luck in monetary success? A lot more than a lot of successful people are willing to admit – even to themselves. Is luck as important as hard work in becoming successful? No – but, in the end, yes.
The case for believing that success is due overwhelmingly to talent and hard work – something every successful person wants to believe – is simple. Leaving aside a few lottery winners and rich heirs, almost every materially successful person is someone with ability who's worked hard for what they've got. But the weakness in that argument is equally apparent: there are many talented and hard-working people who haven't amassed much wealth.
What separates the two groups is good fortune. Some talented and hard-working people have enjoyed the additional benefit of a lucky break or two, some haven't, or have suffered unmerited setbacks of one kind or another.
Some have had the good fortune simply to have avoided any misfortune. And, of course, there are talented, hardworking, lucky people who aren't all that outwardly successful because they haven't given material success a high priority. (But don't bother feeling sorry for them – they've probably enjoyed far more personal satisfaction than those who measure their worth in dollars.)
It's easy for us to forget how much our success is owed to good luck. Everyone living has been born into the world at its most prosperous point. Everyone born in Australia starts with an enormous advantage over most other people in the world, in terms of free schooling and healthcare, freedom to choose their own path and freedom from predation. When we joke about the importance of choosing the right parents, we acknowledge the role of inheritance in influencing future success. Even when our parents have no great wealth to pass on, a big part of intelligence is inherited and academic success is greatly influenced by whether your parents were readers and valued education. I've long believed that the example set by parents produces hardworking children.
Chance events are more likely to be decisive in any competition as the number of contestants increases. That's because winning a competition with a large number of contestants requires that almost everything goes right. This, in turn, means that even when luck counts for only a trivial part of overall performance, there's rarely a winner who wasn't also very lucky. In the topical case of athletics, luck can come in the form of wind. It would be stupid to deny that anyone winning a world record in the 100 metres, the 100-metre hurdles, the long jump or the triple jump was both physically gifted and had done years of training. But of the eight current world records (men's and women's) seven occurred in the presence of a tailwind and none with a headwind.
Say there are 100,000 participants in a contest where luck counts for just 2 per cent performance, with ability counting for 49 per cent and effort for 49 per cent. For each contestant, the computer draws a number at random separately for each of the three components of their total performance. The computer repeated this game many times (just as repeated tossing of a coin brings the result closer to 50/50). The average luck score of the winners was 90 out of 100. And 78 per cent of winners did not have the highest combined ability and effort scores. But if luck plays such an important role in success, why do the successful so often want to deny it?
We downplay the role of luck so as to motivate ourselves to try hard. When I wish Year 12 students good luck in the exams, I sometimes add: "You know how to be lucky? Make your own. The harder you work, the better your luck." But there's often another, less worthy reason for denying our debt to good fortune. We use it to sanctify our wealth and justify our reluctance to pay high rates of income tax. I'm well off because I made the right choices, studied when I could have played, saved when I could have spent and worked damn hard. Those people in the outer suburbs are poor because they didn't work and sacrifice the way I did. I earned all I've got and it's quite unfair to tax me extra to give handouts to people who're too lazy or undisciplined to do what I've done.
That's why it's so important for successful people to acknowledge their good fortune.
- Ross Gittins
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Topic: [2016 LA Club] Week 21 (Read 2782 times)