Lucky vs. Repeatable 幸运与重复
Lucky vs. Repeatable 幸运与重复
- Luck plays such a big role in the world.
Luck plays such a big role in the world. But few people want to talk about it. If I say you got lucky, I look jealous. If I tell myself that I got lucky, I feel diminished.运气在世界上起着如此重要的作用。但很少有人愿意谈论它。如果我说你很幸运，我会显得嫉妒。如果我告诉自己我很幸运，我就会感到自己被削弱了。
Maybe a better way to frame luck is by asking: what isn’t repeatable?也许塑造运气的更好方法是问：什么是不可重复的？
Lucky implies random events you could not see coming. What isn’t repeatable is different. Did Jeff Bezos get lucky creating Amazon? Not in the same way a lottery winner is lucky, of course. He was visionary and ambitious and savvy to a degree you only see a few times per century.幸运意味着你看不到即将发生的随机事件。不可重复的就是不同的。杰夫·贝佐斯创立亚马逊是幸运的吗？当然，彩票中奖者的幸运与幸运不同。他富有远见、雄心勃勃、精明，其程度每个世纪都只有几次。
But could he, starting today, without any money or name recognition, create a new multi-trillion dollar business from scratch?但从今天开始，他能否在没有任何资金或知名度的情况下从头开始创建一个价值数万亿美元的新业务？
Maybe, but probably not. There are so many things that helped Amazon become what it is that can’t be replicated – growth of the internet, market conditions, old competitors, politics, regulations, etc. Bezos is enormously skilled in a way that is not luck. But a lot of what he did was not repeatable. Those points are not contradictory.也许吧，但也可能不是。有很多因素帮助亚马逊成为了不可复制的企业——互联网的发展、市场条件、老竞争对手、政治、法规等等。贝佐斯在某种程度上拥有极高的技能，但这并不是运气。但他所做的很多事情是不可重复的。这些观点并不矛盾。
It’s so important to know the difference between the two when attempting to learn from someone. You want to try to emulate skills that are repeatable. Attempting to copy the parts of someone’s success that aren’t repeatable is equivalent to a 56-year-old dressing like a teenager and expecting to be cool.当试图向某人学习时，了解两者之间的区别非常重要。您想要尝试模仿可重复的技能。试图复制某人成功中不可重复的部分，就相当于一个 56 岁的人把自己打扮得像个青少年，并期望自己很酷。
There’s a law in evolution called Dollo’s Law of Irreversibility that says once a species loses a trait, it will never gain that trait back because the path that gave it the trait in the first place was so complicated that it can’t be replicated. Say an animal has horns, and then it evolves to lose its horns. The odds that it will ever evolve to regain its horns are nil, because the path that originally gave it horns was so complex – millions of years of selection under specific environmental and competitive conditions that won’t repeat in the future. You can’t call evolutionary traits luck – they came about because of very specific forces. You just can’t ever rely on those forces repeating themselves exactly as they did in the past.进化中有一条叫做“多洛不可逆定律”的定律，它规定一旦一个物种失去了某种特征，它就永远不会重新获得该特征，因为最初赋予它该特征的路径是如此复杂，以至于无法复制。假设一种动物有角，然后它进化到失去角。它进化重新获得角的可能性为零，因为最初赋予它角的路径是如此复杂——在特定的环境和竞争条件下经过数百万年的选择，而这种选择在未来不会重复。你不能称进化特征为运气——它们的出现是由于非常特殊的力量。你永远不能指望这些力量会像过去一样重复出现。
A lot of things work like that.很多事情都是这样运作的。
In business and investing, you want to learn the big lessons about why things behave the way they do without assuming the past is a direct guide to the future, because it’s not – most of the details are not repeatable. History is the study of change, ironically used as a map of the future.在商业和投资中，你想要学习关于事情为何如此运作的重大教训，而不是假设过去是未来的直接指南，因为事实并非如此——大多数细节都是不可重复的。历史是对变化的研究，讽刺的是，历史被用作未来的地图。
Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal once talked about what happens when you try to learn a very specific, non-repeatable lesson when a broader, very repeatable lesson is what you needed to pay attention to:《华尔街日报》的贾森·茨威格（Jason Zweig）曾经谈到，当你试图学习一个非常具体的、不可重复的课程时，当你需要关注一个更广泛的、非常可重复的课程时，会发生什么：
[After the dot-com crash], the lesson people learned from that was not, “I should never speculate on overvalued financial assets.” The lesson they learned was, “I should never speculate on internet stocks.” And so the same people who lost 90% or more of their money day-trading internet stocks ended up flipping homes in the mid 2000s, and getting wiped out doing that. It’s dangerous to learn narrow lessons.[互联网泡沫破灭之后]，人们从中吸取的教训并不是“我永远不应该对估值过高的金融资产进行投机”。他们学到的教训是，“我永远不应该投机互联网股票。”因此，那些在互联网股票日间交易中损失了 90% 或更多资金的人最终在 2000 年代中期炒房，并因此破产。吸取狭隘的教训是危险的。
The great thing when you ask, “is this repeatable?” is that you start to focus on things that you and I – ordinary lay people – have a chance of repeating ourselves.当你问“这是可重复的吗？”时，最棒的是。是你开始关注你和我——普通外行人——有机会重复的事情。
You can learn a lot from Warren Buffett’s patience. But you can’t replicate the market environment he had in the 1950s, so be careful copying the specific strategies he used back then.您可以从沃伦·巴菲特的耐心中学到很多东西。但你无法复制他在 20 世纪 50 年代的市场环境，所以要小心复制他当时使用的具体策略。
You can learn so much from John D. Rockefeller about the importance of controlling distribution. But you cannot replicate the 20th century legal system that allowed him to destroy competitors, so don’t get carried away there.你可以从约翰·D·洛克菲勒那里学到很多关于控制分配的重要性。但你无法复制 20 世纪允许他摧毁竞争对手的法律体系，所以不要得意忘形。
Elon Musk can teach you a lot about risk-taking and branding, but much less about competing in the auto business.埃隆·马斯克可以教你很多关于冒险和品牌建设的知识，但更不用说关于汽车行业竞争的知识了。
Jeff Bezos can teach you so much about management and long-term thinking, but much less about e-commerce and cloud computing.杰夫·贝索斯可以教你很多有关管理和长期思考的知识，但更不用说电子商务和云计算了。
The way to get luckier is to find what’s repeatable.变得更幸运的方法是找到可重复的事情。