Winning the lotto is nearly 100% luck.
Changing your strategy because you keep failing over and over until you finally succeed is 90% non-luck.
I'm really tired of people looking at anyone successful and saying that somehow there wasn't nearly as much skill or dedication involved, it MUST be luck.
Well, I should clarify that by "luck" I really mean "anything other than the strategy a person attributes their success to". For example, it seems that Steve Jobs believed very strongly in magical thinking. In the end, it probably cost him his life, but he really seems to have believed that his success was, at least partially, due to his spiritualism. In that sense, even if his success were due to his other skills, I would categorize it as "luck" in the context of discussing the effects of Zen Buddhism. If you took 1,000 other people and had them apply the same spiritual principles to their lives, you would find that Jobs' success was still anomalous and would need some other explanation.
So when I say "luck", I am not making a judgment about whether the person "deserves" their success, or whether there was "skill involved" with their success. Instead, the meaning of "luck" that I am using is more related to the concept of statistical noise. It may seem weird to say "Steve Jobs wasn't successful because of Zen Buddhism; he was just lucky that he happened to have one of the best marketing minds of his generation combined with an excellent understanding of aesthetics and user interface, and an aggressive instinct for competition", but that is what I mean. Admittedly, using the lottery as an analogy may have been distracting.
The fact is, simply becoming successful cannot give you a strong idea of why you were successful. It gives you one data point and no scientific control. You will encounter other successful people, but this is not a random sample, and it only tells you one side of the story. The only way to even begin to figure out what strategies are actually causally related to success would be to analyze a proper random sample of both successful and unsuccessful people and look for correlations.
What is the difference between changing your business strategy and changing your gambling strategy? If you tried lottery tickets and the horse track, then finally hit the jackpot at the slot machines, would you say that 90% of the win was due to your active involvement in choosing the game?
The fact is that no matter how faithfully you reproduce the superstitious rituals of a past lottery winner, your odds will be the same as everyone else's. It is foolish to walk in someone else's footsteps before you assess the odds and find out how much effect the strategy actually has, and that successful person is not who you should talk to to make that assessment.