The key ideas

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

Robert H. Frank, 2016

Why does the most talented person so rarely win? Economist Robert Frank survived cardiac arrest only because an ambulance happened to be nearby, and decided to investigate how small coincidences determine big outcomes. You will discover why successful people fail to notice their luck, what this means for everyone, and why thinking about good fortune makes people more generous.

Who it is for

For anyone who works hard and takes pride in their results. For anyone certain that people get what they deserve, and anyone who doubts it.

The average number of legs people have is slightly below two. So most people really do have more legs than average.

The ambulance that happened to be nearby

On a cold Saturday morning in 2007, economist Robert Frank was playing tennis in the American town of Ithaca. His partner was his friend and coauthor, psychologist Tom Gilovich. In the middle of the game, Frank’s heart stopped. It was sudden cardiac arrest: a malfunction of the heart’s electrical signals that most people do not survive.

But a car collision had just occurred a few hundred meters from the court. Two ambulances had been sent, although only one was needed because nobody was seriously hurt. The second, normally stationed eight kilometers away, reached Frank within minutes. Later he would say that he was alive only through sheer chance.

Frank is an economics professor at Cornell and has spent many years writing about how markets work and why people spend money as they do. In 2016, he published this book. Its idea is simple and uncomfortable: talent and effort matter, but chance determines far more than we are willing to admit. Especially where thousands of strong contenders compete for a single reward.

What follows is about more than good fortune. Frank shows why successful people fail to notice it, what that blindness costs everyone else, and how, by his calculations, life could improve while taking almost nothing away from anyone. You will see your own victories in a new light and perhaps become a little kinder to yourself and others.

The painting a thief made famous

Today everyone knows the Mona Lisa, and it seems things could never have been otherwise: Leonardo, the enigmatic smile, genius. But Frank reminds us that for centuries it was one of many valued paintings in the Louvre, rather than the most important painting in the world. Everything changed in August 1911. Former museum worker Vincenzo Peruggia carried it out of the Louvre, and newspapers worldwide reported on its disappearance for more than two years.

By the time the painting returned, it was already the most famous in the world. Explanations appeared afterward: of course, it was all about the smile, the technique, the mystery. In hindsight, every success looks inevitable. Psychologists call this trap hindsight bias. Once the outcome is known, we feel it could have been predicted in advance.

Here Frank draws on sociologist Duncan Watts. In an experiment Watts describes, people listened to unfamiliar songs in an artificial music store and saw what others downloaded. A song’s quality determined its fate only partly. Much depended on which songs happened to attract the first downloads, because people then followed others’ choices.

This leads to the book’s first lesson. An account of someone’s triumph usually leaves no room for chance because it is constructed backward from the ending. But every such story had forks where things could have gone differently.

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About the author

Robert Frank is an American economist and a professor at Cornell University. He writes about behavioral economics and winner-take-all markets.

All books by this author: Robert H. Frank

Terms from the book

  • Buffett
  • Cornell
  • Friedman
  • Gates
  • Cook
  • Ithaca
  • Gilovich
  • Meritocracy
  • Sudden cardiac arrest: A condition in which the heart suddenly stops pumping blood because its electrical signals malfunction. Without help in the first few minutes, the person usually dies.
  • Peruggia: Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian former Louvre worker who stole the Mona Lisa in 1911. The painting was found in Florence more than two years later.
  • Hindsight bias: The tendency to consider an event predictable once its outcome is known.
  • Watts: Duncan Watts, an American sociologist who studies networks and how people influence one another’s choices.
  • Cranston: Bryan Cranston, the American actor who played Walter White in Breaking Bad.
  • Cusack: John Cusack, an American actor known for films of the late eighties and nineties.
  • Broderick: Matthew Broderick, an American stage and screen actor.
  • Winner takes all: Frank and Cook’s expression for markets where the slightly better participant takes almost the entire reward while someone almost as good gets almost nothing.
  • Seles: Monica Seles, a tennis player and former world number one. A spectator attacked her during a match in 1993, and she did not compete for more than two years.
  • Graf: Steffi Graf, a German tennis player, one of the most decorated in history and Seles’s main rival.
  • Davidai: Shai Davidai, a psychologist who researched with Gilovich why people remember obstacles better than help.
  • Keltner: Dacher Keltner, an American psychologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies power and emotions.
  • Yuezhou Huo: An economist. Frank describes Huo’s experiment on how thinking about external causes of good fortune affects generosity.
  • American Society of Civil Engineers: A US professional engineering organization that regularly grades the condition of the country’s infrastructure.
  • Expenditure cascade: Frank’s expression for what happens when the richest spend more, prompting the people just below them in income to spend more too, and so on down the chain.
  • Progressive consumption tax: A tax on the amount spent rather than income: income minus savings. The higher the spending, the higher the rate. Frank’s proposal, which is controversial among economists.

All terms

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