Contributions of Talent, Perspective, Context and Luck to Success

Abstract: We propose a controlled simulation within a competitive sum-zero environment as a proxy for disaggregating components of success. Given a simulation of the Risk board game, we consider (a) Talent to be one of three rule-based strategies used by players; (b) Context as the setting of each run of the game with opponents' strategies, goals and luck; and (c) Perspective as the objective of each player. Success is attained when a first player conquers its goal. We simulate 100,000 runs of an agent-based model and analyze the results. The simulation results strongly suggest that luck, talent and context are all relevant to determine success. Perspective -- as the description of the goal that defines success -- is not. As such, we present a quantitative, reproducible environment in which we are able to significantly separate the concepts, reproducing previous results of the literature and adding arguments for context and perspective. Finally, we also find that the simulation offers insights on the relevance of resilience and opportunity.