And plenty of people get lucky, but don't work hard enough to turn that into success, and get nowhere and die.

Which is a more important factor of AB, A or B? You can't disentangle them. And since you have control of A, and no control of B, people should be praised for and incentivized to increase A.

Lord, grant me the courage to increase A, the serenity to accept B, and the wisdom to tell them apart.

Nothing I've said contradicts your statement. I agree wholeheartedly. But that is precisely why process-oriented thinking is important.

I think everyone (with the free time) should invest in learning Poker or card games. Lessons there can be applied elsewhere while still remaining intuitive and easy to understand!

It sounds dismissive. Try that on your friend or someone that says "I worked hard on this, my company sold, etc..." Ahh you were lucky nice.

Oddly enough, I doubt you'd think that it sounds dismissive when you turn it around:

"I worked really hard on this, and then I got sick and everything fell through" "Really sorry you had some bad luck, I know you worked hard on that"

Simply bringing up - in a public forum - that luck and hard work goes hand in hand isn't dismissive. It is just pointing out how things simply are. No one is dismissing that folks work hard on things. Working hard simply isn't enough for success.

Yeah it just seems to chalk it up to chance, as in you can't take ownership of your deeds because it was just "luck". To me luck is buying a lottery ticket. A rocket doesn't fly on luck, it's planning, calculations, it's not "bad luck" something went wrong and they figure out what it was.

I will "concede" to this that yes I was a lucky person, some random people (they were blood relatives but might as well be random) decided to adopt me from a 3rd world country, idk why. Even though I failed college I still found a way out.

You shouldn't be praising that the company sold. Of course, a congratulations, etc. is in order (as you would if someone won the lottery!).

What you should praise is the _input_. Their hard work. The effort. I believe there are studies reinforcing this difference being crucial wrt education of children but I don't have any on hand. :)