Luck and Life

Reader's Digest: Luck greatly affects your life. In fact, luck had a hand in everything you believe happened sheerly out of your will. In life, it's best to just have a goal in mind, and then work towards that goal, instead of having a detailed plan. Actions are repaid, on average, and the best way to have better luck is to do more things and to be positive.

Over the past week, I've become fascinated by the idea of luck and it's influence on our lifes and our influence on it. This topic first surfaced for me while reading Scott Adams' "Success Formula" for business, though the formula could just as easily be for life. You can read for yourself his opinions on this, and I'll return to my story with his suggested reading of the book The Luck Factor by Doctor Richard Wiseman (how great a name is that! :) ). I purchased this book on a hunch (something just felt "right" about it) and it came this Monday. While reading through it, I'm struck by the sheer magnitude of the affect "luck" (or if you'd prefer, positive random chance) has on our lives. Now, The Luck Factor offers ways to "improve your luck" and I'll get into those a little later, but first an exercise.

Think, on a scale of one to ten, about how luck has affected your life, with one being not at all and ten being a lot. Write that number down, if you so please. Now, think about the following questions:

• How did luck affect how you met your partner?
• How did luck affect how you came to know your closest friend?
• How did luck affect the main factors that have influenced your choice of career?
• How did luck affect a major event that had a positive influence on your life?

After thinking about those questions, did your "luck effect" number change? I know that mine did. After thinking about these questions for a while, and other questions that I myself came up with, I was amazed at how much what I thought was conscious effort on my part to shape my life in fact involved luck. In fact, I can attribute the fact that I'm even thinking about this post to the random event that I came across Scott Adams' blog a few months ago. Without that, I would have never picked up The Luck Factor, would have never gotten this in depth into the idea of luck, and wouldn't have made this post. Damn.

Obviously, luck, or once again, random chance, pushes out in all directions, both past and future. As the Steve Jobs said, "you can only connect [the dots] going backwards." At the same time, you can only pick a general direction going forward. Everything else, it would seem, involves luck.

If luck is such a strong influence in our lives, what's a poor schmuck to do? This is where Scott Adams' poses some very interesting ideas in his book God's Debris (which, if you forgot, you can download for free. It's really worth the read!). In the book, the protagonist, a young, intelligent mail carrier, meets a wise old man and begins to discuss just about everything under the sun. However, one of the more interesting ideas they discuss is that everything in life has to do with probabilities. Basically, the old man takes a quantum-esque stance and says that life is all just a bunch of probability waves and that free-will is a joke. For example, he says when you go into your car, either you fasten your seatbelt or you don't. If you do, you improve your probability of surviving the trip. If you don't, you reduce the probability. There is no way to be certain whether or not you'll survive the trip, because it's only on average that people who wear seatbelts survive more than people who don't.

In other words, the old man is proposing a more complex version of karma. Yes, your actions do have consequences, but it's only on average that the good get rewarded and the bad get punished. Don't expect helping that little old lady to lead you to a pot of gold. Only on average.

Truly brilliant stuff. Dr. Wiseman offers some suggestions about influencing luck in his book, most of which I probably shouldn't share with you so you actually go out and buy the book. The first one, which I will share, is so simple, it hurts. Extroverted people tend to have more luck. This makes sense, because the more people you meet, the more likely you are to meet people that will positively influence your life. Such a simple idea that is so easy to apply to life.

And a more general version of that truth, the more things you do, the better chance you have of coming up "lucky." It's all in the positive outlook. Attitude is everything.

Namaste.