Successful people are keen on telling their success story while people who did not win are busy trying agian or have depression in quiet corner, hopefully short term. Any characteristics derived from self-reported or externally observed data that successful group shares is always askewed due to selection or surviorship bias because of this.
The only true thing here is: people who analyze the data more and reason based on this, can draw better outcome. It is not luck, but yes, might look like one.
You can work harder at tossing coins and toss them more often but previous outcomes do not affect current or future outcomes in any way. No matter how many times in a row a coin lands tails up, there is still only a 50% chance that it will land heads up on the next flip.
Working harder/smarter than someone else at something for which each try increases your capability to influence the next try should give you an edge in a competition but now it's not about luck.
> I wonder if those who believe they are lucky work harder and take more chances than those who don’t.
Now, if anything, you can also postulate that people who believe they are lucky don't work harder and take less chances (hey, they are lucky, they don't need to try as much as others).
So the question would be: why do some people who think they are lucky try their luck more than some who don't think they are lucky and why do some people who think they are lucky try their luck less than some who don't think they are lucky ? It's two opposite behaviour but they have the same belief. Why ?
If price of failure on a coin toss is less than the value of success, then flipping the coins as rapidly as possible is a winning strategy. (I've worked on failure after failure, but the occasional success has more than compensated for these).
It doesn't matter how fast you flip coins, in the end it'll be 50/50 anyway and you'd still get the same success (price of failure wouldn't matter, it'll always be the same value in the end).
Many successes are unintended outcomes while trying to do something else. Without awareness of the opportunity and pivoting, there would be no success to write about (or possibly a different one if lightning struck twice).
Robert Greene explains in a video his 48th law of power.
The rule is there is no rule. Life is fluid he says. You've got to pickup the little clues, use your intuition and your gut feelings.
This perfectly matches my experience of life. When you arrives in a situation with a premade plan and execute blindly, it often fails dramatically, even if on paper you did exactly what you were supposed to. Especially with people of course. You've got to go with the "flow", read the room, feel the air. Sometimes it almost feels magical. Even the light a particular day will be different and somehow, things are different - the people in the street, the mood of your boss, everything.
The great leaders are masters at that. I often think about the current China leader for example. It's just an example.
Do you picture what a person must pull off to get that seat? It's unimaginable. You've got to smell the "bullets" coming miles away before they're even shot, from a shooter you dont even know. Just on a hunch because that day, the light was different.
More and more for practical purposes I tend to believe that - sit tight - everybody is solving or capable of solving the Poincaré conjecture. Let me explain.
Granted some people are simple, but most are actually very gifted at what they do ; it's just that the type of engineering they do is different than yours (or mine, whatever). Besos says "there is a million types of inteligence".
Some are good at making dramas for example - and they'd beat you at that game every single day. Some others are good at, I dont know, working out.
Many people are very very good at playing dumb is actually my very point. And they love that. If you are observant, you'll see little clues that they are geniuses in some ways. It's just that they dont care about advancement. In itself it's a form of dumbness but beside that, they freaking good.
You can easily do x2 on your percieved intelligence and engineering capabilities of people. They way way better at what they do than meet the eye. Especially nowdays as they are educated.
I guess what he means that being #1 doesn't always means you're that good, maybe the competitors are just lame. Some videos of Olympic 1918 shows that the winner is totally unimpressive because the participants are just few amateurs. But after all it's another function of supply (seat) vs demand (challengers).
I would be interested to know exactly which video of Robert Greene's this is. Just finished reading Mastery this morning. Great author and thinker. He is very in tune with human nature and instinct.
" The great leaders are masters at that. I often think about the current China leader for example. It's just an example. " You mean that guy who brings Chinese economy into troubles and just does one genocide (or two, if you count Tibet).
I love how grand parent used that as an example instead of some boring “business luminary”. Now people are gonna politi-rage in a third of the replies.
So they just didn't know what luck was and invented their own definition to sound smart?
2 and 3 are definitely not luck, because it's affected by your actions. 4 can have partial luck, because people sometimes view you better or worse than you expect, and you can't predict your complete reputational outreach.
1 is the only definite piece of luck here, like being born to the right parents, or a stranger that you held the door for being the CEO that offers you a job.
If the stranger you held the door for being the CEO that offers you a job that is luck, but you would be stirring the pot if you were always super polite and held the door for everybody. This assumes that holding the door somehow led to the job offer which I think the original description assumes, based on how the English language generally works.
Aside from that in the stirring the pot scenario you apply to 10 jobs, two of them offer you jobs, one below market rate, one at market rate.
You stir the pot and apply to 100 jobs, 2 of which offer you jobs signficantly above market rate.
Stirring the pot is not strictly luck, but it is precursory to what is often described as luck and as such can often be described as a form of luck that you make yourself by adopting behaviors more likely to lead to lucky outcomes.
on edit: I see akamoonknight had the same thought I did, but didn't take as long to write the comment. Lucky.
It's funny because in that last sentence I think you're describing something like in the article. "Holding the door open" might not be something that people do to strictly have the potential to hold the door open for a CEO, but they definitely hit on that possibility more often than those who don't hold the door open at all. So is that "blind luck", or in the parent example (and i think sort of the articles) is that more along the lines of "stirring the pot"?
My personal experience is that quite often "luck" is just someone winning via statistics.
After all, when you try something that has a 1% probability of success seventy times, it becomes a coin toss whether you succeed at least once.
I was "lucky" with the apartment I bought because I've become obsessed with checking listings and at one point was doing it several times a day.
Took eight months to find the right property and now when I talk with people looking for a place everyone swears that there's nothing for sale in my area.
The truth is that there is - 3-4 times a year and you have to call the same day, because it gets bought immediately.
Can you help me understand those types of real estate markets? If they are sold immediately doesn't that mean the sellers are giving up substantial gains by not asking enough?
What I do know is that most of the apartments I've seen which were offered at a good price went for sale as part of a divorce settlement. My significant other has an uncanny talent in getting such information from people.
This neighbourhood was planned with families in mind and people hold on to their properties here, so I suspect it's mostly divorcees wanting to deal with the matter as soon as possible.
Normally investors scoop it all up, but at the third attempt in this area I managed to get ahead of them.
Divorce makes the fastest sales but the thing is people always sell for a reason anyway and every seller have somehow a deadline depending on what’s next.
Most of the time, sellers are in the process of buying another place (or other life reasons like divorce or whatever) so they are incentivized to sell at a good price but also pretty quick.
My mum just finds 4-leaf clovers everywhere. It’s not serendipity, she looks for them, but she has the uncanniest ability to find them. Similarly my wife can spot animals in the wild like a drone, it’s insane. She’d be the woman on the boat saying “look! Dolphins!”. We go diving together and she sees 10 times the amount of stuff I can see.
I dont think this has anything to do with focusing or not, and letting things happen, or what not. Both my wife and my mom are extremely focused. This is something else entirely that’s hard-wired in the brain.
To the clover half of your anecdote I can add my own: there was an elderly neighbor whose front yard had clover, and a surprising amount of four, five, or even six leaf clover. My friends and I would browse in the yard every spring, and we all found something.
Reminds me of the old phrase, "luck is when preparation meets opportunity". The strategies discussed in this article seem to maximize the "opportunity" side of that equation.
Not necessarily. Just because one increases the chance that opportunities arise, does not imply that they are immoral or selfish.
Just as an obvious example, if you were looking for career opportunities to improve the lives of people, and you spent your time volunteering part-time in order to improve your chances of doing so full time, then accepting an opportunity in the space would hardly be opportunist.
A proper opportunist (what the word means) grabs opportunities for the sake of and in spite of being morally obligated to take other things into consideration.
Luck has been associated with "happiness" in many cultures across the last few thousand years. There is a concept of management accounting of "rewarding for b while hoping for a". I think the soft focus that allows for creativity helps "luck", but everyone who "knows better than you" wants to proud out good behavior by rewarding for b.
In support of this: in Russian, the adjective for "lucky" and "happy" is the same – schastlivyi.
Though a more precise variant that specifically means "lucky" exists (udachlivyi, meaning possessing greater chances), schastlivyi is more often used to describe a person, with the semantic content being that they are both happy and lucky.
For example, the famous Tolstoy quote about unhappy families being different and happy families all looking alike uses schastlivyi.
> In support of this: in Russian, the adjective for "lucky" and "happy" is the same – schastlivyi.
Where are you getting this info from?
I am a native speaker, and the two words one would typically use for “lucky” in Russian are “везучий” or “удачливый”. I’ve never heard of“счастливый” being used to refer to any kind of luck or even allude to it. If someone asked me to translate that word, it is straight up the exact same as what “happy” is in english, no different/extra connotations or anything.
I am also a native speaker. The context I hear it is when, for example, someone wins a game or finds loot within one – "Эх, какой счастливый!...." or "Счастливый человек!" Another example: "у него счастливая рука" (he has a lucky hand [at cards]) [1].
Most dictionaries will offer both happy and lucky side by side (with "happy" being the first definition, "lucky" the second). See the links for some textual examples.
In other households it could very well be that you use "везучий" or "удачливый" more often, but mine (grant it, very far from Moscow) never has.
I thought this was very cool but then I realized that in Dutch it is the same. Happiness = "Geluk" = Luck. Strangely, we have no word for lucky, and we will simply say that someone often "has luck".
There's so much hidden in homonyms, it almost feels illegal to mention it.
"Счастливый случай" is more of an equivalent of “happy accident”saying in english. It is an almost literal translation of the saying that just happens to work the exact same way in both languages.
That doesn’t mean that “happy” (in english) is synonymous with “lucky” or that it makes sense to apply “happy” the same way outside of that saying in english. Same thing in russian with "счастливый случай". If you use "счастливый” to apply to something outside of that saying, it will mean “happy” 100% of the time. If you try using it in place of “lucky” in russian, I can guarantee that people will be very confused even after you explain your reasoning for doing so.
P.S. “случай” literally means accident/happenstance, it doesn’t mean chance. There is a word for chance in russian that is extremely commonly used, and it is pretty much the same as the english word (“шанс” pronounced as “shahns”).
But leaving aside starting points, etc. I can still think of two specific points in my career that had a pretty much seamless transition that could have gone very badly (and did for a number of co-workers). Yes, I had the network, but they were generally fairly precarious times and things came together very quickly.
I find luck very strange. On one hand, I try to be rational and interpret it as just statistics. On the other, I sometimes get creeped out at seemingly “too good to be true” luck. As in sometimes money just falls from the sky among other seemingly impossible things.
I think of Charlie Munger's "good investment is knowing when it's wise to not diversify". The luckiest people I know tend to have a soft, scattered approach as advocated in the article, followed by striking hard and quadrupling down when they find something that works. Arnold Schwarzenegger is very lucky and he uses that strategy. "My genetics and frame are perfect for body building? Guess I'll quadruple down on it."
He's said that he had a difficult relationship with his father, who sounds like a mean, small-minded man. The posters of half naked men on Arnold's wall probably didn't help.
Bodybuilding was once mocked. Maybe it needed someone who grew up defying norms to make it popular.
Great article and I very much agree with the message, but I feel the need to point out that you are misspelling the name of Richard Wiseman as "Wiesemen" throughout!
Imagine a group of people on vacation in Spain. They decide to take a tour bus to visit a new town a few hours away.
About halfway into the journey the bus engine dies and the bus comes to a halt and can no longer continue.
Half the people storm off the bus complaining. “How could this happen??” “Our vacation is ruined!” “Worst vacation ever!!”
The other half gets off the bus and says, “Let’s explore this area today!”
I consider myself a very lucky person. Being lucky doesn’t mean nothing bad happens. It means when things go wrong, we are like water and easily adjust to the new circumstances.
The way to be lucky is to built these three essential ingredients: Resilience, Optimism and Gratitude.
I would go further and say the key to a great life is Resilience, Optimism and Gratitude.
I think my focus is hardening as I get older. This might also be why I find myself in situations now where I just can’t make sense of whatever hot garbage UI that tool X rearranged for no apparent reason. I have a lot of pattern recognition from using computers so much but my focus is sometimes so narrow that I will not see something that I might have if I softened my focus.
The only true thing here is: people who analyze the data more and reason based on this, can draw better outcome. It is not luck, but yes, might look like one.
Cheers!