This is an interesting point, at least the initial first premise. The conclusion seems off though. In order to leverage your own assets, you need to be able to size up not only your own strengths and weakenesses, but also those of others. PA, like social status, and others of the same ilk is a real (if not always 'earned' asset). As such, you should never ignore it or be oblivious too it. It falls in a spectrum of intermediary assets -- like connections -- that you just cannot be aloof to. Understanding the odds matters -- This is just "Luck" considered as an proxy for stochastic variation. Understanding the odds is critical to strategy/rational decisionmaking under uncertainty (such as making an NPV>0 wager). There are few examples where the ability to make rational decisions under pervasive uncertainty is more important than in a startup. This (just throwing it out there) might be one reason startups fail. Or it might be one reason that contrubutes to something that was in fact mentioned (founder breakups, having a deal blow up, etc).
There is one big difference between luck and attractiveness, though. Luck is a big unknown except in hindsight. If you knew you were going to be unlucky, there's very little you could do (I hesitate to say nothing but I can't think of anything).
Tools, techniques, and strategies for dealing with "the unknown" are a fundamental part of intelligence. As a corralary, the denial of uncertainty is the most un-intelligent of strategies.
It follows that your statement has within it a bit of insight: just knowing that risk matters. So even if you can't know (with precision) your exact 'luck' at every moment, you can build upon the fact that X,Y,Z observed variable could have gone another way had P, Q, R not happened by chance. Just being aware of the magnitude of the potential variation is a useful piece of information. For example, this can guide you to more rationally hedge your bets. Or to "make luck" by managing variables to not happen by chance. Or to just know when it makes sense to keep rolling the dice -- persistence & resiliency. Etc. In this sense, Jessica did touch on something that seems to come in handy here -- resourcefullness -- just in general but in particular when the "enexpected" happens.
Luck is like time travel.
Once you've done such an analysis, luck moves on to represent all those factors that you didn't take into account.
That's what the word means.
PG has a good quote, how ignorance can be useful when it keeps you from making other, bigger mistakes.[1] I think this is worth keeping in mind. Does ignoring luck [2] make you better off? Its not clear ignorance is the only strategy.
