Skill vs Luck Audit

Say this

Was this skill, luck, or a mix — and in what proportion?

Do this now 2 min

After an outcome — good or bad — write: If I made this exact decision 100 times, how many times would I get this result? If the answer is less than 70, luck played a significant role. Adjust how much credit or blame you assign accordingly.

Use when

You're evaluating a past decision and want to learn the right lesson from the outcome.

Avoid when

The outcome is so clearly skill-driven or luck-driven that the exercise would be trivial.

Why it works

If you can't separate skill from luck, you'll draw the wrong lessons from every outcome. You'll double down on lucky strategies and abandon unlucky good ones.

Imagine replaying the same decision a hundred times with small variations in timing, context, and circumstances. In some domains — like chess — the outcome would be nearly identical every time. That’s pure skill. In others — like venture capital — the same decision would produce wildly different outcomes depending on factors outside your control. That’s high luck. Most real-world decisions sit somewhere in between, and knowing where matters enormously for learning. If the outcome was mostly luck, the useful lesson concerns how you managed uncertainty rather than the exact action you took. If it was mostly skill, you can confidently repeat or avoid the behaviour. Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive: treating luck as skill makes you reckless, and treating skill as luck makes you passive.

Go deeper · 8 min read

The Skill-Luck Continuum: Why You Must Know Which One Drove the Outcome

A good outcome doesn't mean the decision was good. A bad outcome doesn't mean it was bad. The lesson you extract depends entirely on whether the outcome was driven by something you controlled or something you didn't — and people often never ask.