Luck, timing, charm: your gut's explanations sound humble. Today we stop treating them as humility and examine them as what they are, statistical claims. They do not survive the examination.
'I got lucky.' 'Right place, right time.' 'I interview well; they'll figure it out.' Each of these sounds modest, reasonable, even virtuous, and applied to a single success each one is genuinely plausible. Luck exists. Timing matters. Charm is real. No statistician objects to any of them, once.
What the gut is hoping you won't notice is that it isn't applying them once. It is applying them to every win you have ever had, and at that scale the claim changes character entirely.
One lucky project is plausible. Two, sure. But a career, years of projects landing, reviews holding up, clients returning, promotions arriving from different bosses at different companies with different standards, all of it explained by luck? Luck is, by definition, the thing that doesn't repeat on demand. As the video put it, a twelve-year lucky streak wouldn't make you a fraud; it would make you the statistically strangest person alive. The boring explanation, the one that doesn't require a miracle, is competence.
The other house favorites fare no better under the same audit. Right timing, for a decade, across markets and managers? 'I fooled them,' meaning dozens of experienced people, independently, over years, none of them ever comparing notes? A good explanation gets simpler as time passes. That one needs more conspirators every year.
Because it runs on speed, not evidence. The gut attribution fires in milliseconds and has never once been asked to defend itself at the pattern level. It explains each win individually, one lucky break at a time, so it never has to face the absurdity of the whole collection. The machine works retail, never wholesale, and that is its entire trick.
We audit rather than argue. Starting next week, the ledger runs a cause analysis on each win: what you did before, during, and after, and what would not have happened without you. Retail examination, one win at a time, on the machine's own turf. The pattern will assemble itself out of your answers, not out of anything we claim here. Until then, keep logging, verbatim. The specimens are the point.