On The True Nature Of Luck
“Oh, I am fortune's fool!”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
A unified comprehension of luck has eluded the best of minds for centuries. Are you born with a pre-determined amount of luck? How do you quantify luck then? Is it the summation of all good things that happen to you or does it include all the bad events you have had the fortune of avoiding?
A separate take on all of this would be the idea that we make our own luck. If we make our own luck, then the differentiator between the successful and unsuccessful is a matter of who made more luck. How do we make luck then? a common idea that permeates thought around this in our society is the fact that hard work begets success and the opposite becomes true for the rest. This idea seems to fail at the point where you consider the fact that people can channel their energy for years into a job, marriage, project, etc. and still come out having lost everything they put into it while having gained nothing but regret.
I am writing this to jot down my thoughts on the subject. These thoughts are often fleeting and are better written down to think over later. My goal here is only to gain a glimpse into the true nature of luck and here are my thoughts
There are Two Types of Luck
Luck can be put into two separate baskets.
Pure Luck is the percentage chance of experiencing fortunate events and missing unfortunate events that is granted (possibly at birth) by a random number generator that god forgot to switch off before putting it in their pocket.
Artificial Luck is that part of luck that we just might be able to influence through a series of factors. Think of it as a booster/add-on to your pure luck that you can get by grinding the game of life.
Luck is Recursive
A deep dive into the concept of luck reveals the fact that you need the luck to get lucky. If you are born into wealth, in a lot of peoples books that makes you lucky, but how did you get the luck in the first place. Barring the theory a deity is just handing out different amounts of luck to everyone (which would go against the fact that such a deity is just and has your best interests at heart) I believe that the luck someone has is born with is a factor of whether they have the luck to be born lucky in the first place. As you go down this mind-bending rabbit hole of finding the origin of luck, you will realize that in the end, it is one of the black holes of thought and philosophy. You can put thousands of years into researching it and still never find where it comes from.
Luck is Non-Deterministic
Assuming that luck is what I have defined it as above, luck displays curious properties. The outcome of waking up to a billion dollars in their bank account is not the same for Elon Musk and a person living under the poverty line. For Elon, this might just be the result of a regular sale of Tesla stock but for the poor person, they might just have cashed out a lifetime of luck overnight. Theoretically, while the percentages of luck may have been different, the input is the same in this equation: a billion dollars. The output however is different: The poor person will experience a different facet of life that wealth brings. They might, out of generosity, enrich the lives of those around them as well. Elon will probably tweet a meme about it and go about his day making another billion. The same input having different outputs leads me to believe that being non-deterministic is a core pillar of luck.
How do you harness luck?
Honestly, while there are a variety of answers I can give for this question. I would rather point you in the direction of this thread on Twitter where Romeen Sheth has put it together in a far more concise manner than I could.
The only thing I would add is an alteration to his formula for artificial luck/manifested luck. Optimism as a binary factor in this equation would make it truly complete. For without optimism, you don’t get to even throw the dice in this game of chance.