“Were the most successful people also the most talented ones? That’s what we would expect… if we assume that we reward the most successful people because they are more talented or intelligent than other people, says physicist Pluchino.

“But we discovered that this is not the case. Instead, very often, the most successful people are moderately talented but very lucky.

“We discovered a strict correlation between luck and success. Encountering a series of lucky events was responsible for incredible success even if their individual talent was lower than super talented people.

“This is what we usually see around us in the real world. There are plenty of instances of people who we don’t consider particularly smart but in some way they reach a high level of wealth and success.”

Of course, you need a certain level of talent to be able to exploit those lucky opportunities, the researchers say, and this "talent" can be anything from capacity for hard work to intelligence, to actually being hard working.

But talent alone is not enough. In the simulation, the people who had the highest level of talent only made up a small portion of successful people.

Share the wealth



These results could have implications for the way policy makers and funding agencies distribute opportunities, such as handing out financial grants for academic research. And this could mean that the most talented people – the people most likely to progress innovation forward – get a better chance to shine through.

The team found several alternatives that could change the way we currently reward people who are already successful.

For instance, instead of handing out bonuses for already high-performing sales people, one strategy could be giving a small amount of money to everyone, which was more effective than the meritocratic system in the computer simulation.

Even giving money to 25% of people at random (regardless of their past performance) led to a higher percentage of the most talented people in the computer model who achieved success than rewarding the most successful people, since as we know, success was largely a proxy for luck.

But past performance is no guarantee of future performance, warns Biondo. “If you value merit exclusively by means of past results, once you realise your past results can be generated not only by talent, but also because of fortunate events, then you are rewarding luck, not merit.”