You don't need a plan to succeed, you just need to know that what you are doing is good. A normal general AI strategy is to try to increase the number of future options, it doesn't really plan it just makes choices which gives it more choices in the near future.

For humans it can be things like going to college, getting a computer science degree opens a lot of door so it is good even if you don't plan to do anything specific. Similarly as a company founder you can just try to do things opening doors, like Google focused on making a great search engine because they believed that having the best search engine would make all other aspects of the company easy.

You could say that focusing on areas which will give you more options in the future is a plan, but I don't think that most people see it that way. For example when you ask a kid why they go to college and they answer "I don't know what I want to do, I'll just study something interesting and see where it leads" you'd typically not say they have a plan. Yet many of them still go on to get valuable degrees and succeed in getting a much better job than the average person.

> Yet many of them still go on to get valuable degrees and succeed in getting a much better job than the average person.

Getting a 4 year degree requires planning.

How so? If you just go to school and do your work, one day at a time, for 16years, you'll get a degree without planning the whole thing.

You have to plan things like registering for the school, planning where you're going to live, planning your finances for the school, planning your schedule around the school's requirements, etc. Just aimlessly going about things isn't going to result in a degree.

I'll provide an anecdote from my own life that I feel highlights the interplay between luck and work:

In 2010, I had just graduated college, was quickly running out of money, and had no luck applying to jobs at software shops with languages I knew. Out of desperation, I applied to a PHP shop, with my only qualification being that I knew Perl, a cousin of PHP. Embarrassingly, I had to admit this in the interview, and even though they let me finish the interview in Perl, I wasn't optimistic.

A week later, I got a call back that the job was mine. There was a big learning curve, but I picked up PHP well enough to rise up to a leadership position on the dev team. When I was promoted, I learned that when I originally applied, the only other person that applied for the position was a guy who brought a guitar with him hoping that would sell them on the fact that he was a great culture fit. They said if anyone had applied that actually knew PHP, they would have gotten the job by default.

I was lucky that no one who knew PHP applied to the job when I did, but it was my hard work that kept me there.

Later in the thread you state "Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need". This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.

> I was lucky

You put yourself in a position where luck could find you.

> This is the luck of winning genetic, social, and geographical lotteries.

It's the luck that 99% of Americans share.

Being born rich can overcome a lot of obstacles. Plans are not always required. Didn't Slack start at a gaming company?

Being born in a free country with a working brain and body is most of what you need. 85% of American millionaires are self-made.