Do you buy a lottery ticket?
Play poker?
Ignore the red light at the corner?
Eat in the company cafeteria?
You guessed it – I’m back to luck.
Based on lots of discussion and comment – I decided to go one more round.
You have to be in it to win it – in other words, you make your luck by buying a lottery ticket or tempt it by eating in the cafeteria – you get my drift. Your luck – if you will – goes into play by your action – or inaction. But at the end of the day – it’s random – you can buy the lottery ticket every week of your life and never win, or eat in the cafeteria every day and never get sick. Random – pure and simple.
So much for my notion of making your own luck – as was pointed out to me by a number of my correspondents. Sure you play – but it’s still random.
The thought troubled me – sure, there is randomness but…I passionately believe we can control more than we think.
Then I saw the following…listen:
“I say luck is when an opportunity comes along, and you’re prepared for it.”
Denzel Washington
And there you have it! A new spin!!!!
Think on it – personal or business – and even if you believe luck is random, be prepared….
In fact, think of all the lottery winners who lost it all….
What do you think?
David, you’ve obviously never eaten at Futurecom in Zurich. The lunch there is superb!
My late grandfather was quite fond of saying that “continued luck is synonymous with skill.”
My favourite phrase for luck will always be Gary Player’s statement “The harder you practice, the luckier you get.”.
can Zurich cater for the rest of us?
Aren’t there really two kinds of luck? Negative and positive results of unknowable random events? The man goes to the park while on a business trip and strikes up a conversation with a woman who becomes his wife? Or a man goes to the park and is hit by a car in the parking lot driven by a bad driver.
The other kind of luck is called good or bad fortune and that kind seems to me to be influenced by our actions and that one has birthed many sayings
Thomas Jefferson “I am a great beleiver in luck and I find the harder I work the luckier I get.” “The lucky man is he who knows what to leave to chance.” anoynomous–or I don’t have the attribution.
The point of both is that if the outcomes left to “luck” are so limited that bad luck has little impact and good luck leverages the hard work. How can the great novelest be thought to be “lucky” to get her book published–she wrote it after all and her talent–is that luck or a combination of skills and hard work? I think its the latter
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds”
Sir Francis Bacon, English author, courtier, & philosopher (1561 – 1626)
This made me think about the lottery ticket scenario. Sure, you need luck – and a hell of alot of it too – to win, but if you bought two tickets instead of just one, surely you would have doubled you’re chances of winning….
“Fortune favours the bold” Virgil 70 BC
Oooh, I love musing about luck.
)
A very old proverb from my area – the Balkans – always sums it up the best for my life choices:
“Always leave the little door of luck open for the guests”.
The most succesful people in our societies are those who find other people’s doors open – that is the opportunity of entering into someone’s life through your kindness, politeness, curiosity and caring genuinely for those who, like you, believe in the power of leaving the little door of luck open. Use that door to find people with whom you should make business, work for and work with.
Then, you have the people who never really go out. Sometimes, I tend to be like that. But I leave my door wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide open. I play the lottery every week for as long as I know (I’m at the break-even point – all I invested, I won). I like to talk a lot with interesting people and to enter new areas of domain, meeting new people and opportunities.
Those with the door closed to guests will not get lucky as easily. They might live a perfect life and, yet… They might end up like the old man in a joke I love:
An old man was praying every night to God: Please, God, help me win the lottery… I did everything according to your word: I feasted, I prayed to You every day of my life, I never disobeyed Your Law… Why can’t You do this little thing for me, at least now, that I dying… And then, of course, God comes in from the sky and angrily yells: I heard your prayer every day of your life, but, you old fool, why don’t you already buy the damn ticket?!
I always remember to buy mine
And that’s all I know about luck. It served me well by now
According to this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-lanza/why-are-you-here-new-theo_b_781055.html, we have a much better chance of winning all the lotteries that ever existed than actually ending up alive as humans on this planet at this moment in time. So what if it’s us, the observers, who actually create space and time? Biocentrism — interesting stuff.
Hi David, I’m a great believer in creating your own destiny and being ready to take advantage of the opportunities before you. Really enjoyed reading today’s post but just wanted to note that while Denzel Washington may be a brilliant actor, he is not be as profound as we may think. His quote seems to stem from Seneca, a Roman philosopher, who said that “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Wanted to make sure that credit was given where credit is due
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The consensus seems to be that you still have to buy the ticket!
My perspective is that we should get away from seperating ourselves from the world in our paradigm. When you do this you see that luck is simply where preperation meets oportunity as the saying goes.
Machiavelli agreed with that in The Prince, saying that life is determined half by fortune and half by virtue. Robert Rubin, who was considered the best Secretary of the treasury since Hamilton, strongly believed that success in decision making came from weighing probabilities in everything. Quantum Mechanics also provides some evidence of this, since science learned that at the smallest scale we know of everything is ruled by probabilities and there’s almost nothing that is guaranteed to happen.