Success stories celebrate effort and grit, but survivorship bias makes it nearly impossible to see how much of the outcome was determined by circumstance — timing, birthplace, economic conditions, or a single fortunate introduction. Existing research offered conclusions but no hands-on way to feel the math.
Built an interactive Monte Carlo simulator where users set their own skill level and luck weighting across 10,000 simulated careers. The visualization tracks outcome distributions, shows where equally-skilled cohorts diverge purely due to random variance, and surfaces the compounding effect of early luck on long-term trajectories.
Even with skill accounting for 95% of an outcome, random variance in the early stages can separate two identical agents by more than 10x over a 30-year career. The simulation makes this visceral — you can watch it happen.