This does not match my experience. While certainly some successful people like to take all the credit, most of the successful ones I know acknowledge either luck, fortune, or God's blessing played a huge roll in their success. Machievelli in particular talked about it at length in the Prince and other works.

But you can't directly control luck. You can directly influence the other factors, and while luck does play an important role, so do other factors. To borrow a quote, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."