Life & Wisdom Quote by John Jakes

The line lands like an anti-guru corrective aimed at a culture that worships craft while pretending outcomes are meritocracy. John Jakes, a workmanlike storyteller who built a hugely popular career in historical fiction, isn’t dismissing talent or discipline; he’s puncturing the seductive fantasy that effort automatically converts into recognition. The key verb is “minimize.” He’s not asking writers to surrender to randomness, only to stop lying to themselves about how much of the marketplace, the timing, and the gatekeepers sit outside the realm of “good choices.”

There’s subtexted generosity here, too. Naming luck is a quiet way of lowering the cruelty of judgment: your book can be competent, even excellent, and still miss because the slot was crowded, an editor left, a trend turned, an algorithm yawned, a review never arrived. It also cuts both ways. Luck didn’t just block the overlooked; it boosted the lucky. That’s an uncomfortable admission for any successful writer, and Jakes makes it without theatrics.

Context matters: Jakes came up in an era when “making it” ran through a narrower set of channels, yet he’s speaking neatly to today’s attention economy, where writers are told to brand, hustle, optimize, and “build audience” as if virality were a moral reward. The sentence restores realism. Control what you can; don’t build your identity on the lie that you control the rest.