

Luck Doesn't Exist - lionhearted
http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=95

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joshfraser
i agree that you definitely have to work hard to put yourself in a position to
"get lucky" but there is an element of chance to life that you simply can't
ignore. a lot of times i attribute good things that happen to me as "luck"
because there's a dozen people i could point to who would deserve it more than
myself. attributing my good fortune to luck gives me an explanation for why i
got something when other people were smarter, faster & harder working than
myself.

~~~
kmak
I think the term "luck" is too overloaded. Tons of people do actually use the
term "luck" as a clutch, as in it's bad luck that a pot of gold did not fall
onto their lap. In that sense, I agree with the article. However, it probably
swings too far in the other direction.

For me, it's understanding the probabilities, persist, and "luck" is
everything that is out of your control. Even something as "simple" or at least
fundamentally human as finding someone you happen to love is subjected to
these outside forces that I call "luck", but who's to judge?

Dismissing this concept of "luck" makes it too hard for empathy -- it's almost
saying that people are poor because they don't work hard.

I'm a relatively lucky guy myself, and I'm constantly surrounded by people who
are smarter and harder working, but sometimes things just don't swing their
way, just a little bit. Maybe I'm selling myself short, and while I put in my
share of hard work, I can't honestly say I attribute everything to luck. I
took advantage of my luck, but it's too easy to attribute everything to skill.

It might be easier to motivate yourself to work hard with the assumption that
luck doesn't exist, and to persist, and to give all you got, but I feel you
don't need to discard the concept to do it.

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rskar
His blog post acknowledges probability. Probability is the measure of
likelihood, i.e. the chance of something happening. Luck is defined as a
chance occurrence.

If luck doesn't exist, there are no chance occurrences. If there are no chance
occurrances, then probability is meaningless. If probability is meaningless,
his blog post is ... crap?

