What is luck?
We often talk about luck while describing people who succeed or fail in life.
And we often ascribe a disproportionately large weightage to the importance of luck in shaping one’s destiny.
In fact, for those unsuccessful, we end up using destiny as the reason for the bad luck and hence the spate of failures.
The weightage assigned to luck also varies. The estimate I have heard varies from 1% to 25%.
But what if luck wasn’t just a mysterious parameter controlled by Gods or the Stars.
What if the actual weightage of luck was a tenth of the weightage that one would normally assign to it, while the rest 90% depended on one’s actions.
Side Note - Every astrologer adds a disclaimer before their "readings", that while the stars foretell the future that they just narrated, the actual future will be dependent on one’s actions, in the process nullifying anything they might have said. Not that this ever stops us from consulting them!
4 kinds of luck
Back to the topic of luck, neurologist and philosopher, Dr. James Austin, published a book called Chase, Chance, and Creativity in 1978. While the book is focused on the role of luck in medical research, I believe the concepts are equally applicable to any creative or life endeavor.
Dr. Austin breaks down luck or as he describes it, chance into four components:
Chance I - Accidental or pure Blind Luck
This is the most commonly referred to component of luck which could actually be attributed to the stars or destiny.
Chance II - Luck due to your motion
This is the type of luck that finds you because you are out there in world pounding the pavement testing, trying, iterating and exploring, trying and failing and pivoting and repeating. Put another way, you have to be in the game to hit it out of the park. Luck will never find you sitting down on your couch.
Chance III - Lucky break that you spot
Because you are not just sitting and waiting for luck to find you, because you have identified your field of work and are relentlessly pursuing opportunities, studying the market, the secular trends, the macroeconomic picture, you might end up being the only one who foresees the opportunity that presents itself.
Chance IV - Luck because of who you uniquely are
This kind of luck happens because of the unique skillset that you might possess. For e.g. the uncommon and unique FBI negotiator who happens to be trained in flying black hawk helicopters will be uniquely positioned to fly into enemy territory unarmed, negotiate a release of hostages and then fly the hostages back to safety. This kind of luck finds you only when you are an expert in your field and also possess a unique combination of skills or experiences. This kind of luck will not come to any ordinary successful negotiator who is just actively pursuing opportunities.
To recap, luck is not just one enigmatic entity that is completely out of our control. Only a tiny fraction is out of our control, the rest is dependent on our actions.
If we want to get lucky, we have to be energetic and constantly experiment and explore, develop deep knowledge in our chosen fields, and combine them with our own unique combination of skills and experiences to stand out. This could very well be the strategy to getting lucky, instead of waiting for luck to find it.
The former English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s quote sums it up perfectly: “We make our fortunes and we call them fate.”