LUCK OR HARD WORK: AN ANECDOTE

If you have not read the last article, LUCK OR HARD WORK: THE OVARIAN LOTTERY AND THE STRUGGLE OF TU YOUYOU, I strongly recommend you do so. Only then will you fully grab the prelude on which this article is built. If you have read it, then let’s roll!

Just some months ago, a friend and I were discussing our getting into the Marmara University’s Faculty of Medicine — was it hard work, luck, or partly both? To have a broader view, let us rewind to when someone told her she is lucky to have gotten into the faculty without submitting any of the exams written by our Turkish counterparts.

“After writing a couple of exams, only the highest scorers get to study at the faculty of medicine. You are lucky you did not go through that rigorous a process,” said Anonymous. She was offended.

Of course, if you had to write your country’s high school-leaving examination under a condition as extreme as under the sun due to the CoViD-19 pandemic, but still made it as one of the top students in the country, you would get offended too. But was it solely luck, solely hard work, or a mixture of both?

In ABSOLUTE SUCCESS IS LUCK; RELATIVE SUCCESS IS HARDWORK, citing Warren Buffett’s Ovarian Lottery, James Clear clarifies how all of us do not have equal shots at life. In the context of getting into the Marmara University’s Medical School, maybe she is lucky to be from Uzbekistan. Maybe I am lucky to come from Nigeria. Maybe the National exams from the three countries — Nigeria, Turkey, and Uzbekistan — do have some nuance, probably significant, differences in how rigorous they are. Maybe our Turkish counterparts run a bit out of luck to go through all those rigorous processes just to get themselves a seat in the citadel of future doctors. Maybe we are the lucky ones.

Just as one dares not dismiss the hard work of Tu Youyou, the PROJECT-523 hero, one too can not dismiss our efforts and give all the credit to luck. My friend had to study 12 hours a day, she had to write her high school-leaving exam under the sun due to CoViD-19, among other things.

I too had to study at night while everyone was asleep. If you are familiar with our humming friends, you would know they come out of their hidings at night, and to avoid their bites, it is safe to be under the USAID nets. But those nets do not offer attractive studying environments. I had to read outside of them, and this mean I should wrap a towel around my legs, and wear a top with overflowing sleeves to protect my arms because mosquito bites in these two areas hit differently.

After a lot of sacrifices, we both emerged in the upper percentiles in our respective countries. We both wrote international exams and excelled at them. After several stages of screening, out of hundreds of thousands of applicants, we were among the chosen few to study medicine at the Marmara University Medical School under the prestigious Turkiye-IsDB Joint Scholarship Programme. One dare not attribute all of that to luck!

What do we now call it? To do justice to this, let us tread James’ path of thought. He wrote: “As you become more successful in an absolute sense, we can attribute a greater proportion of your success to luck.” On a more global scale, my friend was lucky to be born into a family of academicians while some other kids were born into families of displaced people from some war-torn countries in the Middle East or East Africa. Damn was I lucky to be born into the Ibrahim's, who value education, while some other kids were born into Almajiri families in Northern Nigeria.

We had a head start against so many kids who in the first place did not have any shot at getting an education. But as we view the case more locally, the wider the cracks for effort and sacrifice to creep in become. “When you compare yourself to those who have experienced similar levels of luck, the difference is in your habits and choices.” This explains why people who had the same level of luck do not achieve the same feat.

While Anonymous was partly right that my friend was lucky, he was not fully right. My friend also struggled. We struggled. And in many struggles, ours included, neither luck nor hard work is mutually exclusive in influencing the end result. Both of them run the show.

Now that you have made it to the end, what do you think about this article? Make use of the comment section or mail me your feedback at imahmuud3@gmail.com

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