A year or two back, I was obsessed with determining the factors for success. I tried to work out all kinds of formulas but in the end I ended up with the following. I view this as an advancement for "metaphorical mathematics":

Success =
([Passion + Focus] * Intelligence) ^Luck

Passion - physical effort that is exerted / time

Passion is how much consistent physical effort you put into changing reality i.e. some world view (however narrow you define world). Physical effort is the only noticeable effort in the world and it is controlled by your thoughts.  

Focus - mental progress on a given problem / time

There's an implicit understanding that your efforts must be focused in a particular direction e.g. for a startup, developing some technology. Effort without focus is a scatter plot but focused effort leads to a line that should trend upwards. Additionally, when you lack focus it's harder to determine how well you're performing. Finally, I've defined it in terms of a percentage of the total effort you spend during the day doing/thinking about something because as I've stated before focus is less about more effort rather than reducing existing distractions.

Focus can also be negative meaning that you're solving so many different types of problems you make backward or stagnant progress on the important problems. When your mental efforts stagnate then you're essentially moving in a negative direction of solving the problem. 

Focus is about reducing distractions so you increase your efforts (physically & mentally) toward achieving your goals faster. 

Intelligence - Amount of knowledge that can be directly applied to the venture.

This can be negative if your knowledge detriments your cause e.g. knowing about the difficulties in a particular industry can cause "analysis paralysis". However, more often having more knowledge is better. Experience is the best process of gaining valuable intelligence. As intelligence is how quickly you can learn and adapt to unusual circumstances.

Luck - Uncontrollable events that impact your decisions

As it's known, luck usually alludes to favorable experiences that propel your efforts. However, there's the flipside when luck "works" against you. I've made luck an exponential factor as when luck works against you (i.e. negatively) then your success has been fractionally achieved (otherwise your complaints would be compliments for your luck!). Yet, on the other hand, if your success is positive (default: 1) then it either does nothing or exponentially improves your odds.

So how can you influence your luck? Well what you would like are 'opportunities that favor you'. Opportunity, as defined by Louis Pasteur, is "chance that favors a prepared mind". So, in the case there's one of two things todo as you enhance your luck:

1. Learn more about the world around you so you're better prepared. most people never realize their opportunities, entrepreneurs do and that's the main difference!
2. Do more stuff so you have more 'chances'. When you put more time, effort, or money into a certain problem, you'll inevitably find a compromising solution that benefits you. Think about it as a random number generator, that mostly provides noise/garbage but the more times you run it the better the signal. Bad luck is simply and ill-timed event so to overcome it either wait out the event's effect or adapt to the new world. In both cases, you're spending more time, energy, and/or money to discover a 'compromising solution'.