Machiavelli's Virtue and Fortune: Skill vs Luck

Machiavelli's virtue and fortune, or virtù and fortuna, are the two forces he said decide whether anyone rises or falls, and five centuries later they still explain more about success than the meritocracy story we tell ourselves. The modern version goes: work hard, get good, and you will be rewarded. Machiavelli would have called that half true. Half, almost exactly.

He wrote that fortune "is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half." Skill gets a vote. So does luck. And in the places where the stakes are highest and the competition is fiercest, it is usually luck that casts the deciding one.

Skill gets you into the room. Fortune shuffles the deck and decides between equals, so you build your dykes before the flood.

Contents

• What Machiavelli meant by virtue and fortune
• Why brilliance is necessary but never enough
• How small variables decide big outcomes
• Build your dykes against fortune

What Machiavelli meant by virtue and fortune

Virtù is not virtue in the moral sense. It is closer to skill, nerve and adaptability: the capacity to act well and boldly when the moment demands it. It is everything you bring to the table that is genuinely yours, from talent and preparation to judgement and the years of work nobody saw.

Fortuna is everything you do not control. The timing of your birth, the state of the economy when you graduate, who happens to be in the room, whether the person judging you slept well. Machiavelli's image for it is a river in flood: when it rises, it "sweeps away the trees and the buildings" and nobody can stand against it.

But he did not stop there, and this is the part people forget. The river only drowns the unprepared. When "the weather becomes fair", he wrote, men can "make provision, both with defences and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal". You cannot stop the flood. You can dig the channels that decide where it goes. Hold that thought, because it is the whole practical point of this article.

Why brilliance is necessary but never enough

Virtù is the price of entry, not the prize. You need real skill to be in contention at all. Nobody lucks into a consultant surgeon's post or a tenured chair without the work. But here is the uncomfortable structure: at the top of any competitive field, everyone has done the work. The final round is not brilliant people against mediocre ones. It is ten brilliant people, all of whom cleared the bar, competing for one chair.

When the field is that tight, virtù stops being a differentiator, because everyone has it. The variance in outcomes has to come from somewhere, and it comes from fortune. Robert Frank, the Cornell economist, makes exactly this case in Success and Luck: in winner-take-all markets, where tiny differences in input produce enormous differences in reward, luck becomes not a footnote but the deciding factor. The more crowded the top, the more a sliver of good fortune is worth.

This is why the meritocracy story is comforting and slightly dishonest. It is true that you cannot win without the skill. It is false that the skill is what separates the winner from the nine other people who also had it.

How small variables decide big outcomes

Picture the real version. Ten candidates, all excellent, all interviewed, all capable of doing the job well. One of them went to university with the hiring manager's sister. You already know who gets the offer. Not because they were better (the whole premise is that they were not measurably better) but because a warm personal connection is a thumb on a finely balanced scale, and the scale was balanced enough for a thumb to settle it.

Now change nothing except the day. One candidate draws the interview slot after lunch, when the interviewer is sharp and fed. Another draws the last slot before home time, when the same interviewer is tired, behind on email, a little hungover from a leaving do, and has just tipped coffee down his shirt. Same candidate, same answers, two different verdicts. The decision was never as objective as the org chart pretends.

This is not cynicism, it is documented. A widely cited 2011 study of Israeli parole judges found that the share of favourable rulings began each session at roughly 65% and fell towards zero right before a meal break, then jumped back up once the judges had eaten. The effect size has been argued over since, but the direction surprises nobody who has ever been hungry and made a decision. If a trained judge ruling on someone's liberty drifts that far on an empty stomach, an interviewer choosing between equals is not immune.

The maths of it is brutal because the input is tiny and the output is binary. A 2% edge from a shared connection does not get you 2% of the job. It gets you the whole job, or none of it. In highly competitive spaces the reward is lumpy: there is a winner and there are runners-up, so a marginal difference in fortune produces a total difference in result. Years of equal effort, decided by a coffee stain.

Build your dykes against fortune

Here is where Machiavelli stops being a diagnosis and becomes a strategy, and where this turns from philosophy into something you can do with your money and your career.

If fortune decides half, and you cannot control which way it breaks, there are two rational responses, and they are the canals in the flood metaphor.

The first is to take more shots. Luck is a numbers game, and you get to choose how many times you roll. One job application, one pitch, one interview is a single spin. Twenty is a different proposition. If any one attempt has just a 5% chance of landing, one go leaves you at 5%. Twenty goes, at the same odds each, put you at 64%. You did not get better between attempt one and attempt twenty. You gave fortune more chances to find you.

This is why putting more work into the world beats polishing one thing to perfection. More applications, more connections made before you need them, more content published, more swings. You are not trying to be lucky on any given try. You are widening the surface area so that luck, when it lands, lands on you.

The second response is the one this site is built on: make sure a bad roll cannot ruin you. This is the barrier against the flood. You cannot stop a redundancy, a market crash, or a business that fails through no fault of your own. You can build the buffers that turn a catastrophe into a setback. An emergency fund is a dyke. A diversified portfolio instead of one heroic stock pick is a dyke. Not depending on a single employer, a single client or a single income stream is a dyke. None of it improves your luck. All of it decides what your luck is allowed to do to you.

That is the pro-worker reading of Machiavelli, and it cuts both ways. It should make you gentler on yourself when a roll goes against you, because the system genuinely is not the clean meritocracy it advertises. And it should make you relentless about the two things you control: the volume of shots you take, and the size of the buffer that protects you when most of them miss. Virtù to get into the room. Dykes for when fortune floods anyway.

The same lesson, with capybaras: when everyone is equal, luck picks the winner, so build a better dyke.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between virtù and fortuna in Machiavelli?

Virtù is skill, nerve and adaptability, everything you bring that is genuinely yours. Fortuna is luck and circumstance: timing, connections, the mood of the person judging you. Machiavelli argued that success needs both, and that fortune decides roughly half of what happens to us while the other half is left to our own effort.

Does luck really matter more than skill?

Not more, but often decisively at the margin. Skill is necessary to compete at all. In crowded, winner-take-all fields where everyone is already skilled, the remaining difference between the winner and the runners-up is usually fortune, because a tiny edge produces a total difference in reward.

If success is mostly luck, why bother working hard?

Because skill is the ticket that lets you play, and hard work is what lets you take more shots. You cannot control the outcome of any single roll, but you can control how many times you roll and how prepared you are when your moment arrives. Effort does not guarantee the win. It buys the tickets.

How do you protect yourself against bad luck financially?

Machiavelli's answer was to build barriers before the flood. In money terms that means an emergency fund, a diversified portfolio rather than one concentrated bet, and more than one source of income. None of it improves your luck. It caps the damage a bad run can do to you.

Is meritocracy a myth?

Partly. The claim that you cannot succeed without skill is true. The claim that skill alone explains who succeeds is not, because it ignores the fortune that separates equally able people. Meritocracy is real as a filter and misleading as a full explanation.

Read Next

• Why the UK Won't Tax Wealth - the political economy behind the meritocracy story, and why the luck that builds fortunes stays out of the tax net.
• Rentier Capitalism in the UK - how much UK wealth comes from owning the right asset at the right time rather than from effort or skill.
• Why Boomers Had It Easier - the clearest example of fortuna at scale: an entire generation carried by the decade it was born into.

Further Reading:

The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel - Housel's chapter on luck and risk is the modern companion to Machiavelli's fortuna: two people can make identical decisions and get opposite outcomes, and pretending otherwise warps how you judge success. (Affiliate link - we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)

Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman - The research behind why a tired, hungry or distracted decision-maker reaches a different verdict on the same evidence, which is the mechanism that turns a coffee stain into a hiring decision. (Affiliate link - we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.)