That wasn't so much a question as a kind of cranky old man observation, so decrankify me.

I want to be cranky with you, if that's okay.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, how much of your life is in your control?

My teacher's unfair, they're all

picking on me, and I get all these marks on my record, and then I can't go on the field trip.

Also, why do we procrastinate? And how can we stop? I don't want to do that. I really, really

don't want to do that. Angela, my question for you today is, I think, really hard, but perhaps important enough to wrestle with.

Are you up for it?

Of course.

Okay.

This question arose when I was reading Maria Konnikova's new book, The Biggest Bluff.

So, Maria, like you, has a PhD in psychology, but she's not an academic.

She's a writer.

And this book is about her quest to become a professional poker player, starting from scratch.

So we made a Freakonomics Radio episode about her book that was called How to Make Your Own

Luck. And really what Maria is wrestling with throughout that book is the relationship between luck and skill.

She's doing it in the context of poker, but it's easy to extrapolate into our daily lives.

So here's the passage that made me think of you.

There's an idea in psychology, she writes, first introduced by Julian Rotor in 1966 called

...