Why it pays to believe in luck

The oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was rumoured to have said that his three rules for how to become rich were: Rise early. Work hard. Strike oil. It’s one of those eminently quotable remarks because it captures something we all know to be true, that luck and chance have as much to do with success as anything else.

Yet we don’t value people for their luck. We don’t exalt those who win the lottery or walk away from a roulette table flush with cash. Instead, we praise talent, skill, and dedication. And that creates tension, because although luck plays a big role in outcomes, it is only the effort we put into developing our abilities that we can control. 

That is the nature of what the French writer Albert Camus called existential rebellion. It is through our own efforts and actions that we find meaning in an indifferent universe, even if the rewards for those efforts have a significant random element. Believing in luck, then, is itself an act of defiance. To work, to strive, to build skill in such a world is not naïveté but rebellion.

How Einstein became an icon

Although we remember him as an icon today, for a long time, Albert Einstein wasn’t very popular, or even well liked, in the early twentieth century. He was German in the wake of World War I, Jewish in an age of heightened anti-Semitism, and so seemingly aloof and full of himself that he claimed that only a handful of people on earth could understand his strange theories.

That abruptly changed when Einstein first arrived in America on April 3rd, 1921 and a handful of journalists dutifully went to meet him. When they arrived at New York Harbor, they were amazed to find a crowd of thousands waiting for him, screaming with adulation and waving handkerchiefs. Surprised at his popularity, and charmed by his genial, off-kilter personality, the story of Einstein’s arrival made the front page in major newspapers.

It was all a bit of a mistake. The people in the crowd weren’t there to see Einstein, but Chaim Weizmann, the popular Zionist leader that Einstein was traveling with to raise funds for Hebrew University (and who the WASPy science reporters didn’t recognize). Nevertheless, that’s how Einstein gained his iconic status, which would overshadow the other great lights, such as Bohr, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, in the golden age of physics.

From there, the Matthew effect (or what network scientists call preferential attachment) took over. Because Einstein was now so well-known, newspapers wanted to report about him and ask him about the other scientific breakthroughs of the day. Just as the rich get richer, the popular get more popular. Einstein became more than a scientist, but a cultural touchstone.

Yet Einstein didn’t study physics for fame. In fact, it was his failure to follow convention that mired his early career in misery, unemployment, and poverty. And, although his groundbreaking work was behind him when he entered New York Harbor, he continued to work on physics until his death in 1955, long after he had become, as Robert J Oppenheimer put it, “a landmark, not a beacon.” 

The Wunderkind almost lost to history

On a January morning in 1913, the eminent mathematician G.H. Hardy opened his mail to find a letter written in an almost indecipherable scrawl. It began inauspiciously:

“I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of £20 per annum. I am now about 23 years of age. I have had no university education but I have undergone the ordinary school. I have been employing the spare time at my disposal to work at Mathematics.”

Inside, he found what looked like mathematical nonsense, using strange notation and purporting theories that “scarcely seemed possible.” Much of it was incomprehensible, except for one small section that directly refuted a conjecture Hardy himself had made just months earlier. Assuming it was some sort of elaborate prank, he threw the letter in the trash.

Throughout the day, however, Hardy found the ideas gnawing at him and he retrieved the letter. That night, he took it over to his longtime collaborator, J.E. Littlewood. By midnight, they realized that they had just stumbled upon one of the greatest mathematical talents the world had ever seen: a destitute young man in India named Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Living in extreme poverty and largely self-taught, Ramanujan had come across an advanced text as a teenager, devoured it, and began filling notebooks with theorems and proofs. He showed his work to local mathematicians, but no one quite knew what to make of it. With the help of friends, Ramanujan sent letters to three prominent professors at Cambridge. The first two ignored him. Hardy was the third.

It is doubtful that Ramanujan was the first aspiring mathematician to send his work to famous professors. Most, like his first two letters, were lost to history. But Ramanujan gave it a shot, got a little lucky, and we’re all better off for it. Even now, more than a century later, his notebooks continue to be widely studied by mathematicians looking to glean new insights.

Hardy, a genius by any measure, was one of the most important mathematicians of his time. But when asked to name his greatest discovery he replied, without hesitation, “Ramanujan.”

The miracle cure we almost missed

In 1891, Dr. William Coley had an unusual idea. Inspired by an obscure case in which a man who had contracted a severe infection was cured of cancer, he deliberately infected a tumor on his patient’s neck with a heavy dose of bacteria. Miraculously, the tumor vanished, and the patient remained cancer-free even five years later.

Looking to repeat his success, he created a special brew of toxins designed to jump-start the immune system. Unfortunately, he was never able to replicate his initial results consistently. His idea was met with skepticism by the medical community and, when radiation therapy was developed in the early twentieth century, Coley’s research was largely forgotten.

Dr. William Coley was unlucky. 

Yet his daughter, Helen Coley Nauts, refused to let the idea die. With a $2,000 grant from Nelson Rockefeller, she founded the Cancer Research Institute in 1953 to study immunological approaches to cancer. While mostly dismissed by the medical community, it did inspire a small cadre of devotees to keep looking, albeit mostly in vain.

A little luck came in 1996, when a researcher named Jim Allison, following a hunch, published a landmark paper suggesting that there may be some merit to Coley’s idea after all. Using a novel approach, he was able to show amazing results in mice. “The tumors just melted away,” Jim would later tell me. 

Excited, he rushed to pharmaceutical companies, hoping to secure funding. Instead, he was turned away. Drugmakers had already invested—and lost—billions on similar ideas. Hundreds of trials had failed. “It was depressing,” Jim recalled. “I knew this discovery could make a difference, but nobody wanted to invest in it.”

Nonetheless, he persevered. He collected more data, pounded the pavement, and made his case.  It took him three years, but eventually he found a small biotech company, Medarex, that agreed to back him and his work. The drug that resulted would open the floodgates and make cancer immunotherapy a viable treatment. Jim would win the Nobel Prize in 2018. 

Becoming an existential rebel

Camus believed our existence was absurd. He compared the human condition to Sisyphus, the mythical Greek king condemned to roll a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll back down again, for eternity. Incredibly, Camus imagines Sisyphus, returning to his labors at the foot of the mountain, as happy, having found meaning in his task.

That is the nature of existential rebellion: to create meaning for yourself in a universe that provides none. In two decades researching innovation, transformation, and change, one constant I have found is that you can’t control your luck. Anything can happen. “Sure things” often fail while low-probability events occur all the time.

We can easily imagine a world in which Einstein remained a clerk in a patent office, doing physics in his spare time; Ramanujan died an anonymous pauper, his genius never recognized; and William Coley’s vision of a revolutionary cancer cure remained a pipe dream. But each persevered against an indifferent universe, and we’re all better off for it.

We can’t control our luck, but we can decide for ourselves how we seek meaning. Einstein spent the final decades of his life in Princeton, NJ, working on theories that would never pan out. On his deathbed, Ramanujan defined a new class of mathematical function and the number that bears his name. Dr. Coley, now recognized as the “father of cancer immunotherapy,” died surrounded by his loving family who were dedicated to his legacy. 

And, like Sisyphus, we can imagine each of them happy, and maybe hoping for a little luck. 

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