Be Delusional, What If It Actually Works Out!

Most people do not call it fear. They call it being realistic. "I am being practical" often means "I do not want to look silly in public." Fair enough. Looking silly is uncomfortable. Still, many good outcomes require a short period where you look a little clueless.

This post is inspired by Veritasium's video on luck and success, built on ideas from Robert H. Frank's Success and Luck. The specific video is here: Success Is Luck, and Hard Work Is Still Required. The core idea is simple: we often over-credit effort and under-credit luck, especially our own luck.

The useful delusion

There is a weird paradox here. If you fully accept that luck matters, you can become passive. If you fully deny luck, you can become arrogant. The better middle path is this: act like your effort matters completely, while remembering your outcomes never come from effort alone. That "useful delusion" keeps you moving, and it also keeps you humble.

Why people miss luck

Veritasium explains this through egocentric bias. We feel our own effort vividly, but we do not directly feel everyone else's effort, timing, help, and context. So our story becomes "I earned this," when the full story is usually "I worked hard, and I got some key breaks at the right time."

When competition is intense, tiny luck differences matter a lot. The examples from the video are great, and they are worth unpacking in more detail.

Take youth hockey. If the age cutoff is January 1, kids born in January can be almost a full year older than kids born in December while still being in the same age group. At that age, a year is huge. The slightly older kids look stronger and faster, so they get selected first, coached more, and trusted with more game time. None of that means the younger kids are less talented. It means one small calendar detail creates an early edge, and that edge compounds.

Now look at ultra-competitive selections like astronaut programs. The pool is full of exceptional candidates. Once everyone clears a high skill bar, tiny differences in timing, exposure, mentorship, available seats, and pure chance become decisive. In other words, skill gets you into the room, but luck often helps decide whose name is on the final list.

That is the uncomfortable part. We want success to feel clean and fully earned. Reality is messier. Success is still deeply connected to effort and talent, but luck can bend the path more than we like to admit.

Why this matters for how you behave

When people believe success is 100 percent personal merit, empathy drops. Generosity often drops too. If "I did it alone" becomes your identity, everyone struggling starts to look lazy in your eyes. That story is not just wrong, it also makes you harder to work with.

Recognizing luck does the opposite. It creates gratitude, makes you more generous, and makes you easier to trust.

My take

My personal rule is simple: put in maximum effort from my end. The more effort I put in, the higher my probability of getting lucky breaks.

Effort does not control luck, but effort increases exposure. It puts you in more rooms, creates more attempts, and gives chance more opportunities to work in your favor. Luck cannot reward work that never gets shipped.

A better operating system

Use ambition, not entitlement. Work like effort is everything. Reflect like luck is always in the room.

Then do one more thing: increase luck for other people. Share context, open doors, recommend someone, give useful feedback, and teach what you know. So yes, be a little delusional and start before you feel ready, but once things work, do not rewrite history as a solo movie.