In The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming repeats Louis Pasteur’s remark: “Luck favors the prepared mind”, emphasizing personal responsibility in success. However, if we examine it through the book, the prepared mind itself depends on luck.

Hamming’s prepared mind can think and understand fundamental concepts like n-dimensional spaces. By his observation, few minds can do so. By my observation, lucky minds can do so.

Hamming also describes through various anecdotes the problems and resources he had access to at Bell Labs. Throughout the stories, the rise of digital computers which few predicted frames many of Hamming’s successes. These too resemble luck.

So luck favors the prepared mind, which depends on luck. Or to say not much at all, luck favors the lucky. Lucky for you, unlike Hamming, I won’t tell you to Eat Sh*t and Die. For those of us not as lucky, Hamming, like a self-help writer, acknowledges the personal nature of success.

I emphasize we must adapt our definitions of success around our changing circumstances, lucky or not, and prepare our minds for those successes. Personally, I have adapted my current definition of success less around work and more around relationships, though I expect that to shift with the times.