Success by suffocation

An analogy, if you will:

Talent-perseverance-luck, the formula for success, and
paper-scissors-rock, a game of chance. I think there's something to be gained by drawing an analogy between this game of chance and the recognised formula for success.

You want control of your life. You don't want the outcome of all your hard work to be the result of a paper-scissors-rock game of chance where you have only the slightest control over the outcome, if that. Yet a paper-scissors-rock game of chance is how life feels sometimes. Others are the measure of your talent and you don't make your own luck, whatever anyone says, because that's impossible. If success is a combination of talent, perseverance and luck, then the only thing you have control over is perseverance. So persevere! Sharpen those scissors and get cutting!

But, if perseverance is merely the scissors component in a paper-scissors-rock game of chance, as I am suggesting, it can defeat talent, or let's say, for the sake of this analogy, overcome a lack of talent, but just as easily be destroyed by bad luck. And as I submit my much persevered with book (intellectual baby) to publishers this week, I worry that no matter the talent/paper or perseverance/scissors in this intellectual baby of mine, a bloody great rock of bad luck could come along and crush its fragile scull to smithereens.

Except... paper smothers rock. Although this has always been the weak link in the paper-scissors-rock game in my view, as rock and scissors 'win' by more obvious means, with a bit of faith I can accept that paper beats rock by smothering it. In my analogy, this equates, with a little faith, to the belief that talent can defeat bad luck, or, in other words, with enough talent you can have success by suffocation. Let's hope this is true. Let's hear it for success by suffocation rather than chance, provided one has the talent of course.

Perhaps I'd be better off with the rock.