You are missing my point. Mr. Silver himself has acknowledged that his discovery was "lucky" in the sense that he set out to create something else (actually, a superglue type of product as I recall) and instead ended up creating, purely by accident, something completely different and with the exact opposite qualities than he set out to produce--the adhesive that we use on Post-It Notes today.
If that's not luck, I don't know what is.
Did luck play a role, certainly. Could it have played out another way, for sure (though the dude holds 20 patents for adhesive materials, so that one lucky break probably wasn't a huge deal in his life), but at the end of the day that "luck" would have been meaningless without an advanced degree in ochem and a corporation that spent 50 years studying glue.
Agreed. But the guy would't have had an advanced degree to begin with in the absence of luck. He was born in the right country. Wasn't abused to the point of being unable to function. His genetic aptitude for analytical subjects must have been pretty high. He must have has some natural mathematical abilities, or at least a natural interest in math. He was able to afford college. Etc., etc., etc. Life is so very random that nobody "earns" their fate in life.