Factors that Lead to Success

By Yiler Huang

In today's class, we looked at many different people who are considered successful in different fields and tried to reason what factors made them successful. After our discussion, I have two important finding. One being that having a PHD helps someone in their success in life, and another one being that luck takes a big part in a person's success.

In the past, I have always thought PHD is only a title and doesn't have much practical use. However, we can see that from our result, about one third of successful people on our list have PHDs. From the information available online, the total population of people who have PHD only makes up 1 to 2 percent of the global population. However, there are about 30% of people on our “successful people” list who have PHDw, hich implies that having a PHD does in fact increase the chance of a person being successful because the percentage of successful people with PHD is greatly larger than the percentage of people who have PHD in the human population. This is a surprising finding to me because I have always imagine that there is not much of a benefit of having a PHD.

I also believe that luck can greatly impact the success of a person. We can see that on our list, about half of the successful people were born in the upper-class of the society. The exact percentage of people who are in an upper income class is not clearly documented on the internet. However, from my personal experience, there are a lot less than half of the population who are in the upper-class of the society. This means that the family a person is born in also largely impacts how successful they are, which is mostly decided by luck.

In conclusion, if you want to be successful, getting a PHD will not be a bad idea. Nonetheless, wether you can get a PHD is also influenced by how wealthy your family is, which is influence by how lucky you are to born in such a family. From this conclusion, we can see that the society is actually not a very fair place since the successfulness of a person is greatly affected by their luck. I feel like this is not a very healthy situation, because this makes unlucky people's life harder than those who are lucky. I think in an ideal situation, everyone should have the same chance of getting successful. However, the society currently is not in this kind of situation.