Bill Gates is a lot luckier than you might realise. He may be a very talented man who worked his way up from college dropout to the top spot on the list of the world’s richest people.

　　比尔.盖茨可能比你想象的要幸运得多。从大学辍学到世界上最富有的人名单上的榜首，或许因为他是一个很有才干的人。

　　But his extreme success perhaps tells us more about the importance of circumstances beyond his control than it does about how skill and perseverance are rewarded.

　　但他的极度成功或许告诉我们，比起靠技巧和毅力所取得回报，那些超出他控制之外的环境因素更为重要。

　　We often fall for the idea that the exceptional performers are the most skilled or talented. But this is flawed. Exceptional performances tend to occur in exceptional circumstances.

　　我们常常认为，异常卓越的成功者是最具技巧或最有才华的。但这并不是绝对的。特殊情况下往往会有特殊的表现。

　　Top performers are often the luckiest people, who have benefited from being at the right place and right time.

　　顶级成功人士通常是最幸运的人，他们受益于正确的地点和正确的时间。

　　Many treat Gates, and other highly successful people like him, as deserving of huge attention and reward, as people from whom we could learn a lot about how to succeed.

　　许多人觉得我们可以从比尔.盖茨以及像他一样非常成功的人身上学到许多如何成功的知识。

　　But assuming life’s “winners” got there from performance alone is likely to lead to disappointment. Even if you could imitate everything Gates did, you would not be able to replicate his initial good fortune.

　　但预设生活的“赢家”只需模仿表演就可以得到，那可能会令人失望了。即使你能模仿比尔.盖茨所做的一切，你也无法复制他最初的好运。

　　For example, Gates’s upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers.

　　例如，比尔.盖茨的上层社会背景和私人教育使他获得了额外的编程经验，而当年只有不到0.01%的人能够接触计算机。

　　His mother’s social connection with IBM’s chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire.

　　他母亲与IBM董事长的社会关系使他能够从当时领先的电脑公司获得一份合同，而这对建立他的软件帝国至关重要。

　　Top performers are often the luckiest people, who have benefited from being at the right place and right time. This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft’s software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft’s favour.

　　顶级成功者通常是最幸运的人，他们从正确的地点和正确的时间中受益。这一点很重要，因为大多数使用IBM电脑的客户都被迫学习如何使用微软的软件。这造成了依赖微软的惯性。

　　The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft’s, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else.

　　这些客户选择的下一个软件更有可能是微软的，不是因为他们的软件是最好的，而是因为大多数人太忙而不能学习如何使用其他软件。

　　Of course, Gates’s talent and effort played important roles in the extreme success of Microsoft. But that’s not enough for creating such an outlier. Talent and effort are likely to be less important than circumstances in the sense that he could not have been so successful without the latter.

　　当然，比尔.盖茨的才华和努力在微软的巨大成功中发挥了重要作用。但这不足以创造这样一个业界顶级佼佼者。才能和努力可能不如环境机遇更重要，在没有后者的情况下，他不可能如此成功。

　　Conventional wisdom, such as “the harder I work the luckier I get” or “chance favours the prepared mind”, makes perfect sense when talking about someone moving from poor to good performance. Going from good to great, however, is a different story.

　　传统的智慧，如“我越努力工作越幸运”，或者“机会偏爱有准备的灵魂”，这些是很有意义的当谈论一个人从差到好的时候。然而，从好的到伟大的，却是另一回事。