3mo ago

'Captain America' star Anthony Mackie: 'We're lying to our kids' when we say success comes just from hard work—luck is key, too

www.cnbc.com 'Captain America' star Anthony Mackie: 'We're lying to our kids' when we say success comes just from hard work—luck is key, too

Marvel star Anthony Mackie says success has as much to do with luck and connections as with talent. Highly successful people like Mark Cuban agree.

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pay off

YSK: If you work hard enough, your work will .’ And that’s not true.

www.cnbc.com /2025/03/17/captain-america-anthony-mackie-success-is-given-not-earned.html

YSK: If you work hard enough, your work will [pay off].’ And that’s not true.

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“Mackie estimates he ‘put in 10,750 hours of training’ before landing that life-changing job. He was proactive, too: He wrote letters to executives at Disney's Marvel Studios over a decade ago in the hopes of landing a role in one of the studio's popular superhero films…”
That sure sounds like hard work to me. What do you think luck is, my guy? It’s putting yourself out there, building connections, and making things happen. That’s how it works. If you sit on your couch all day a studio exec isn’t going to ring you up for a staring part in a marvel movie.
In fact, I might go so far to say his flavor of “luck” exists to prop a person up as a standout above others—destined to be so.
- This is the dumbest take you could possibly get from this.
  Edit: In case you didn't get it from the article. He is saying all that extra work he put in didn't actually get him parts.. It was random timing and luck that landed him a role.
  
  To be fair, I think all the extra work he did do helped the luck come to him. He was constantly working and looking to get those roles, so when they did come around, he was ready to take the opportunity. Luck is still the dominant factor, but working to be ready to take advantage of the chance was important too.
  
  That's still luck, not hard work.
  
  No, it's definitely both. Luck is going to be the larger factor on that level of success, but there's still a large portion of hard work that went into it.
  We want to dismiss the successful as just being born under the right star, but a large portion of it is still hard work. They get disproportionately rewarded for that hard work, and often they have to do less and less hard work as time goes on... but there was hard work involved, whether we want to admit it or not.
  
  No wonder propaganda is so effective. Someone can tell you to your face their experience, and people will just dismiss it out of hand.
  
  You're right! The man can say he works hard for years and you dismiss it as entirely as just luck instead of mostly luck.
  No one is saying luck isn't the deciding factor here, we're just saying there's also a limited measure of hard work. It's not all just one thing. There is a very precious few who just keep falling into luck over and over again, but they're in the extreme minority of even the successful. The majority of them put in some hard work.
  
  Good talk.
  
  Maybe one day you'll decide to have one with someone else instead of the voices in your head :)
- I suggest reading Fooled by Randomness.
  But I respect you for being confidently wrong.
- Sounds like you need to understand statistics. If another person followed his footsteps and put in 10,750 hours, would they land in the same spot as him? Is that path repeatable by anyone? No? That's luck.

16 comments