5 ideas
Bacon grants that outward accidents such as favor, opportunity, and the deaths of others help fortune, but holds that its mold lies chiefly in a man's own hands. One man's folly is another's fortune, because the quickest rise comes from exploiting others' errors, as a serpent becomes a dragon only by devouring another serpent.
Open virtues win praise, but hidden, nearly nameless virtues win fortune. Bacon means small 'deliveries of a man's self', a readiness he links to the Spanish desemboltura, where no stiffness or restiveness in the mind blocks its turning with events. Like the Milky Way, these are faint stars invisible one by one but bright together, so fortune comes from an accumulation of barely noticed traits rather than one great quality.
The Athenian general Timotheus reported his achievements to the state and repeatedly added, 'and in this, Fortune had no part.' Bacon notes that he never prospered in anything he undertook afterward. Against him Bacon sets Caesar, who told a frightened pilot 'you carry Caesar and his fortune', and Sulla, who chose the surname Felix ('lucky') rather than Magnus ('great').
Wise and able men credit their success to Providence or luck rather than to their own skill, because this defuses the envy that visible personal merit provokes. How a success is explained matters as much as the success itself.
Bacon distinguishes fortune that arrives suddenly from fortune built through repeated trial. Hasty fortune produces an 'enterpriser and remover', a restless projector always starting new schemes. Exercised fortune, earned through practice, produces the genuinely able man.