“‘Captain America’ Star: Does Effort Guarantee Success? Don’t Mislead Children”

Many parents teach their children that as long as they work hard, they can achieve their dreams. However, this notion often overlooks the role of luck. Anthony Mackie, the lead actor in the 2025 Hollywood film *Captain America: Brave New World*, pointed out that it is misleading to solely emphasize hard work as the key to success and ignore the factor of luck.

Mackie, 46, recently admitted on *The Pivot Podcast* that “we lie to our kids.” Parents often tell children that “as long as you work hard, you will succeed” and claim that “hard work always pays off.” However, Mackie believes this is not entirely true because most of the time, success is “given” by a higher power rather than solely “earned through hard work.”

Mackie’s acting career validates this point. Before portraying Sam Wilson in *Captain America: The Winter Soldier* in 2014, he had been acting for over a decade. This new role was seen as a breakthrough in his career. Since graduating from the Juilliard School of Music in 2001, he had been accumulating experience in the theater and film industry, starring in films like *The Hurt Locker* in 2008. However, in the competitive world of Hollywood, he struggled to stand out.

He revealed that before landing this breakthrough role, he dedicated around ten thousand hours to training and even wrote letters to Marvel executives expressing his desire to be cast in a role, but to no avail. Eventually, with a stroke of luck, the opportunity came when he met with the Russo brothers and was invited to join the new film. He finally transitioned from minor roles to a leading role in a major film.

Mackie is not the only one who values luck. Mark Cuban, a well-known American investor with a fortune of 4.1 billion dollars, stated in a 2023 interview with *GQ* magazine that those who claim to have started from scratch and become billionaires solely through their hard work often exaggerate because the right timing and good luck are crucial. He believes that if he had been born a few years earlier, he would not have achieved his current success. Clearly, luck, connections, and abilities are equally important.

Warren Buffett’s longtime partner, Charlie Munger, emphasized in a 2018 speech at the University of Michigan that even if you are the hardest-working and most talented person in the room, your success is still tied to luck. He admitted that he had never deliberately pursued wealth but unexpectedly found success.

So what are the characteristics of people who are considered “lucky”? Psychologist Richard Wiseman summarized in his book *The Luck Factor* that these “lucky” individuals often possess the following traits:

1. They remain optimistic. Even in difficult situations, these “lucky” individuals acknowledge that things “could have been worse.” Pessimistic individuals may give up and shut out all luck.

2. They do not turn down new opportunities. People considered lucky exhibit openness and adaptability, enabling them to constantly meet new people and form new relationships. The key to new opportunities lies within these new connections.

3. They make decisions based on intuition. Ruminating too much and overthinking can result in missed opportunities and indecisiveness. People with good luck tend to make decisions quickly and trust their intuition, allowing them to seize new opportunities ahead of others.

4. They bounce back quickly from setbacks. Failure is inevitable, but when things do not go as planned, they maintain a positive attitude of “things will get better in the future,” minimizing the negative impact of failure and setbacks, ultimately breaking free from a streak of bad luck.

Most people do not carefully contemplate what “luck” really is. What defines “good luck” or “bad luck”? What triggers mechanisms determine why one person experiences good luck while another faces misfortune? In fact, in the wisdom of thousands of years of Chinese civilization, there is already a very profound explanation.

In China, there is an old saying: “Good reaps good, evil reaps evil.” This means that in order to have good luck in the future, one must “accumulate virtuous deeds and do good.”

However, amidst the complexities of life, many instances of reaping good or evil do not manifest immediately but reveal themselves over a longer period of time, or even, according to the Buddhist theory of karma, in the next life. This leads to a situation that many find hard to believe or understand: why do some people have such good luck while others, despite all efforts and hard work, seem to achieve nothing in the end?

Regardless of belief in this concept, “good reaps good, evil reaps evil” is a wisdom from ancient civilizations. Those seeking to change their luck for the better in the future can start by “accumulating virtuous deeds and doing good.” Moreover, when educating children, while urging them to keep striving, it is important not to forget to impart the ancient wisdom about the consequences of good and evil deeds. Otherwise, as Mackie cautioned, it is misleading children.