So I would call that closer to being "visionary" rather than being lucky. In other words, it's seeing something before other people see it. Seeing unrecognized potential is a skill that I believe requires a certain form of intelligence.
You could imagine someone choosing information retrieval without any special insight... but those kinds of people usually don't have enough curiosity or motivation to get to the frontier of the field and push the boundary.
When you say "someone got lucky", you are usually undermining their success, by implying that their personal talents and hard work didn't have much to do with it.
He did not say that. If 100 people work on diverse subjects for 10 years because they have a personal interest in them and one of the subjects suddenly becomes a hot topic, then one of the persons is a winner.
It is possible to reverse your argument and say that you are undermining the success of the remaining 99.
You could imagine someone choosing information retrieval without any special insight... but those kinds of people usually don't have enough curiosity or motivation to get to the frontier of the field and push the boundary.
When you say "someone got lucky", you are usually undermining their success, by implying that their personal talents and hard work didn't have much to do with it.