The true genius is a man, in body and mind like other men, who chooses for himself an exceptionally difficult task and gives it the full effort it demands. No luck is involved; he was not just born that way; no intricate combination of genetic base pairs can pre-determine a man’s resolve and the number of hours he puts in at night after the rest of the world has long gone to sleep. Nor were special, mystical faculties anywhere to be seen. One does not intuit the Calculus or the motion of planets. The men who make history understand that the results of their work ultimately depend on the strength of their will, the potency of their effort, and the rigor of their reasoning – on them and them alone. Serendipity might offer an occasional clue to the proper path – but it is a man’s own responsibility to notice it, interpret it, and apply it with the utmost diligence. Another man, had an apple struck him, might have thought it only an occasion to get his head inspected for bruises.

          The delusion that any success can be easy – attainable through mere chance – is the reason for the continued prominence of disappointment, disillusionment, and unhappiness in an age which abounds with material goods and opportunities alike. If a man thinks he can succeed through mere chance, he sees no need to exert himself; if a man attributes his failure to pure luck, he will not accept responsibility for his own predicament. The great man accomplishes more precisely because he recognizes that – in the long run – he is the sole determining factor of his fate. No obstacle, not even death itself, can ultimately undo the fruits of his resolve; Newton’s discoveries have survived him by centuries – and the generations that followed him did not preserve his work by random chance or whim. The Nobel, Ford, and Rockefeller fortunes continue to shape the economic and cultural dynamic of the world, over a century after they were accumulated.

          Others watch the great man – Mozart at his piano, Edison at his laboratory – and think: how easily and how effortlessly these prodigies seem to accomplish their feats! But such observers see only the results; they do not see the process that attained them. They do not see the hours of methodical preparation, the days of developing incomplete but promising thoughts, the months and years of building on a base of skill and knowledge at the expense of leisure and luxury. The regular times Mozart spent alone, experimenting with combinations of notes to find those fruitful few; the thousands of failed attempts Edison made at a technical problem before finding one that solved it – those the public does not see. This omission distorts, discolors, and impoverishes the prevailing view of men who succeed at monumental tasks.

          There exists no special breed of men with extraordinary faculties or propensities for success. Biologically, all men are quite indistinguishable from Paleolithic savages who lusted after nothing less ignominious than the blood of the neighboring tribe. The men who build a civilization, the men who through inaction allow it to fall into disrepair, and the men who wantonly tear it apart, differ only in how they choose to approach the world. Those who succeed in their endeavors – at whatever level or occupation – do so because of a thorough and active reliance on themselves. Those who fail waste time in idleness, hoping for luck to bring success to them. Or they accumulate resentment of the successful – wishing to expropriate, to equalize, to pull down those they consider undeserving of riches and honors. The jealous think that they will somehow become better off if they undermine the men who struggle to produce, to furnish the goods and ideas used by the rest of mankind – who ask for nothing more in exchange than the liberty to act as they reason fit and the right to keep what they have earned. Yet the expropriators will ultimately be as undermined – as greatly worse off – as the expropriated; they will think that they suffer only because their luck has changed for the worse. Yet reality will remain adamant. Like millions in the oppressing and oppressed, regulating and regulated, commanding and obeying nations of the world, those who believe success is a function of luck will continue to suffer.