You Can Make Your Own Luck | Hacker News Reader

You Can Make Your Own Luck

wsj.com

12 pointslxm22 comments

No, you can't.

You can be prepared for opportunities, and you should. Prepared people will, on average, fare better than those who are unprepared.

But there are a trillion factors beyond your control. Smart, prepared people fail all the time. Stupid people randomly succeed all the time. The former group will do slightly better than the latter, but not nearly as much as you'd hope for from a just world.

I get exercised about this because it quickly leads to blaming people for misfortunes. If you can reliably make your own luck, then people who have not fared well must be stupid, lazy, or morally defective. That lets us get away with thinking that it couldn't be us, and that we don't need to have any compassion for them. That makes an unjust world even less just.

Yes, go do all of the things that you'd think of as "making your own luck". But spare a thought for the fact that while "luck" isn't magic, it is the result of factors that you cannot control and aren't even aware of. That's healthier for you and healthier for society.

If you define luck to be exactly synonymous with chance, then you are right.

There is a subtle difference between luck and chance. Chance is that uncontrollable randomness. Luck is a combination of chance, being prepared, noticing opportunities, not dwelling on negative experiences, and increasing entropy.

If you look at luck as a combination of those factors, it turns out most are under some degree of your control.

I know plenty of people who have decent lives, are lazy, keep a strict routine to minimize surprises, and have not reacted to opportunities which could have turned out really well for them. They consider themselves unlucky.

“If you get a lucky break, you have to really use it. You have to fight like a bastard. You can’t just sit there and wait to get lucky. It doesn’t happen.”

- Joe Simpson, who, written off for dead, survived one of the most harrowing mountaineering accidents ever documented.

I was lucky to be born into a middle-class family in the USA with access to good schools.

I'm lucky to be a quick learner.

I'm lucky that all the challenges I've faced in life have been manageable.

I can't think of how I would have made that kind of luck for myself.

Gratitude for your luck/privilege is a humble thing.

https://archive.li/JQU3O

"Luck favours the prepared" is a saying that's stuck with me

Just to be clear, that statement negates the idea of luck.

Not really, you can expand it to "Luck favors those who are prepared to take advantage of it." They are more fertile ground for random favorable outcomes that fall everywhere.

Luck is necessary, but not sufficient.

To be clear, most people have average luck, so with average preparation and an average amount of hard work things will turn out average, on average. Helps if you're born rich and all that, but on average this holds some truth.

Sometimes, you'll be unbelievably unlucky, and no amount of preparation will fix that. But that's unlikely, so you have agency.

Maybe the dictionary definition, but not the colloquial use by many logical people. It is about recognizing and taking advantage of opportunities as they arise. There are several life events that I happened upon (luck) that I was able to recognize and attempt to take advantage of that have shaped my entire life. Looking back, I can see how little changes during these events could have led to a radically different outcome.

Is there a reason you think it does? I don't believe the two ideas are at odds with each other.

How so?

The idea here is that being successful on any venture is half chance (luck). If you're creating more chances (putting in the work, "being prepared") you're creating more chances.

Weird premise. This article is describing ways to get people to like you and ways to create new life connections, not ways for random chance to favor you. Luck isn't controllable.

If I'm a middle-class white guy and my uncle owns a Fortune 500, and he hires me because he knows my Dad (despite me having no experience or skills), and I work my way up the ranks and become an executive, getting hired wasn't lucky.

If, as an executive, I'm going on a business trip, and I miss my flight because of a car accident in front of my taxi, and the flight I was going to take ends up crashing, not being on the flight was lucky.

You can't make your own luck but you can always be preparing for the things you want.

You can make a choice to decide what your goals for success really are. In that you can choose to remove the burden of struggle and pain pursuing something you no longer want, and instead sail into prevailing winds even though they aren't going the direction you started out in.

Being willing to let go of things is hard too. You can prevent yourself from capitalizing on luck by stubbornly refusing to consider any outcome other than the one you NEED.

Anybody can experience luck but you also need to actualize on it. When you are in the thick of depression and struggle it can be literally impossible to either see or make use of the luck you have.

Sometimes in the middle of the deepest, darkest shit you just gotta stop being sorry for yourself and make a conscious choice to be thankful for what you do have, even if it's not much. Finding ways to practice gratitude and self compassion will help you have compassion for others. It's like unclenching the fist of pain and anger that depression twisted you into.

Expectations are the enemy of luck. You DO have some control over how your brain processes the experience, and how you subsequently behave. You can drive the meat skeleton in a positive way regardless of bumpy roads.

Articles like this trigger my suspicions for another thinly veiled 'the poor can only blame themselves for being poor' (you listening vance?) Especially when contrasted by someone like me (richer than half the planet, rich loving parents, peaceful country, free uni, healthcare, powerful passport) who claims to have magically done everything himself.

In street photography, there is this advice 'buy good shoes'. Obviously, if you don't go out, you will probably not find that lucky shot. But the mere fact you can, in fact, walk about in your free time snapping, is mostly luck.

> Unlucky people skip over opportunities right in front of them.

This idiot does not know what she is talking about. Unlucky people are those who don't get opportunities in the first place.

Wall Street Journal bootstraps cumrag from their "Work & Life columnist", literally begins with a dubious founder origin story. Save yourself three minutes and read something else.

But but I read WSJ for the cumrags

articles like this are propaganda pieces for capitalism. I’m not using propaganda in a negative term, just that’s what it is. Success in business is mostly about luck. Luck of birth, luck of timing, luck of education….

And they propagate the lie of the American Dream. If you're not filthy rich, it's all your own fault.

True, but all of those strokes of luck put together don't make for success without virtues like wisdom, grit and hard work. And with those virtues many people have succeeded without those kinds of luck. So the virtues are more central to success than the luck.

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