Evening Reflection: Do we &quot;create&quot; our Own Luck?

dollarsandsense (58) · 6 years ago

This was a topic that I actually just recently had a conversation about right here on steemit.

The gist of my idea is that luck != chance. Luck is emotional reaction to chance occurrences. Chance is just math and statistics. To shamelessly steal from myself, here’s the comment in its entirety:

To me, luck is purely an attitude. Now granted, if you flip a coin, there is a 50-50 chance that it will be heads. Say you have $20 riding on the coin toss being tails. If you win, you’d call that “good luck” but if you lose it’s “bad luck.” But I think this is taking the idea of chance too far. The coin flip results simply are. Your attitude about them is where we get the idea of luck. Luck implies something outside of anyone’s control. But the laws of physics, statistics, and probability govern everything, so as Obi-wan Kenobi said, “in my experience there’s no such thing as luck.”

I have watched gamblers lose their minds at the blackjack table when someone to their right didn’t hit when they were supposed to. That caused everyone to their left to “get a different card than they were meant to get.” In this case you have the opposite problem of “luck” - if they still win it’s good luck but if they lose now it’s the other player’s fault. Really either outcome is pure chance.

Or take Steemit itself for example. Say I spend an equal amount of time on two quality posts and one of them gets Curied and the other does not. There is some chance involved in whether or not a curator sees either post, but so much more is dependent on things that are controlled by other factors besides chance (post quality, subject matter, personal preference, etc.). It is far too easy to say I had “good luck” on the one that got Curied and “bad luck” on the one one that didn’t. It takes all responsibility out of my hands when I chalk things up to luck.

To reference Star Wars again, the droid C-3PO constantly spouted odds. To him, there was no luck either, just probability. A robot would not feel “lucky” at wining the lottery or “unlucky” at being involved in a plane crash. They would simply recognize the relative unlikeliness of each event, with no added emotion coloring their reaction.

So to boil down my argument to a bite sized quote of my own, I would say that “luck is how you fill the emotional gap between chance events and your reaction to them.”

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denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

Appreciate you sharing your previous post/comment. I'm somewhat in agreement with what (I think) you're driving at here... that luck is a "response" to a simple statistical event.

I'll share a story of my own here... I played a lot of golf when I was younger. One time I found myself in a fairly significant tournament, playing with this young Belgian guy, Pierre... we were both pretty young at the time. Anyway, we're going along in the 3rd round of a 4-round event and are pretty much having identical rounds, while both catching up to the field, overall.

Anyway, point here... on the 15th hole, Pierre hits a real "shit shot" from the tee; it goes in the woods; then the unmistakable sound of the ball hitting a tile roof. And then... evidently it hit that roof at such an angle the ball bounced right back to the middle of the fairway. "You're a lucky guy!" I tell him, and he agrees.

So I tee it up and hit my shot; it purdyneer ("pretty near") perfect down the middle of the fairway. Where it hits a sprinkler head (or maybe a stray rock?) and takes a sky high 90-degree right bounce, into the woods and into someone's yard... out of play.

If you go to the root of the incident, these were merely a couple of "events." And yet, I felt massively unlucky, while Pierre felt incredibly lucky.

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dollarsandsense (58) · 6 years ago

Yep, that ties into my feeling perfectly! (And what a story, I can see why you can still recall it so easily this many years later!)

You both experienced an extremely unlikely event. But you both felt differently about it.

Now as to whether or not there’s some kind of deeper meaning, personal qualities, or cosmic karma driving all this... I’ll leave that to everyone else to decide 😆

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denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

The Karma factor is often an interesting thing for me... but I can't ever justify applying it to single events... but I start speculating, when someone has a protracted series of similar events happen.

Like someone tries every conceivable way to make something work for them, but an endless series of both personal and global hazards prevent them from getting to their objective. I'm trying to think of an example... but they escape me, for the moment.

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sunlit7 (59) · 6 years ago

while others seem pursued by a long string of misfortune. Why does that happen? Is it real, or just our imaginations?

How does that song go...if it wasn't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all. Some people are just born into it. Alcoholic perverted father, alcoholic mother, a sister chopped into itty bitty pieces by a mass murderer, two brothers serving life sentences, another who did fifteen years, a sister who is a stripper....that's not imagined, that's reality, you can dig some luck out of there in between but it's never going to be enough to overcome what ailed you. At least I've never found any decent guy who wanted to take me home to Sunday dinner with the parents yet.....lol.

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denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

What comes to mind as I read your response, it that there's difference between "fortune" and "luck." Misfortune does tend to come with a series of hardships. But I have also seen unfortunate people be lucky.

For example, my friend M-E had much that kind of background... and yet she has a remarkable knack for putting herself into situations where uncommonly "good things" happen to her. Why? What's that mechanism about? Is it just determination? Or is there something else at play, on top of that?

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sunlit7 (59) · 6 years ago

My last comment on another thread reminded me I was going to come back to this comment. I was really tired the other night and what I had thought of responding back was more than my brain was willing to put into thought. I don't think being born into a family like that is unlucky or a misfortune technically, it was just a preexisting set of circumstances that were well into play before my siblings or I were even thoughts. Considering all the suicides in the prior generation, the alcohol abuse, etc., it had become entrenched into a pattern of behavior that seemed normal. If it seems normal then it's neither being lucky or unlucky it's just normal. I had several years of counseling before I understood that. I often wondered why I attracted to alcoholics like a magnet....because the behavior seemed normal. Determination can come into play, at times though you are still predestined to limitations no matter how much determination you have. If one has/had opportunity/opportunities to see a difference and break the cycle of abuse there may be mechanism that come into play whereas something good comes along that may shield them, whether that be on a long or short term basis goes back to the limitation(s) issues, what others are willing to acknowledge and accept.

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pepe.maya (65) · 6 years ago

Happiness is a matter of choice. We create our reality... :)

moniroy (59) · 6 years ago

absolutely right

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denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

I do remember reading that "people are about as happy as they make up their mind to be," and that makes a lot of sense to me, just based on the people I have met.

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niko3d (57) · 6 years ago (edited)

Luck is intresting indeed, for me I find that Luck is a form of chaos theory multiplied by risk management and educated choices(possibly uneducated too)
My partner often says I'm lucky with my career but again this is down to choices I've made and areas of work that I wanted to focus on.
The existence of related jobs aren't by chance though the opportunity may well be.

denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

Luck does seem to be some kind of "outcropping" that grows out of the chaos. Single incidences happen quite a bit, but for some people it seems like there is something else... it's like they MAKE luck. Is that purely an issue of optimism? And Self-confidence?

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deirdyweirdy (61) · 6 years ago

AS @sunlit7 says, your beginnings are a matter of luck, your looks, your intelligence, your family circumstances. All of these things are outside your control and contribute in some measure to how lucky you'll be in your life.

denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

Well, by that measure, I would say that I was lucky to be born into a reasonably sane and largely functional family... but I have felt less "lucky" that a remarkable number of workplaces I have been part of (for example) have closed or gone out of business not long after I found employment there.

Did I CREATE that reality, or was there an "it" that somehow caused it to unfold that way? Hard to say... from where I am sitting.

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deirdyweirdy (61) · 6 years ago (edited)

Oh dear. That'd make you wonder alright. You can't have been that lousy a worker that you caused several businesses to go under........can you?;)

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shilpavarma (53) · 6 years ago

I believe in luck. Though hard work in right way at right time can’t be discouraged or ignored. They are important to succeed but if luck doesn’t favour all these factors won’t work. Sometimes have you seen some people don’t put any efforts and stil get it, that is the prove that such thing as Luck does exist. That is my take on luck!

denmarkguy (76) · 6 years ago

And most of that makes a lot of sense. Some people seem more blessed with positive outcomes than others, and it has little to do with their own efforts.

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cuddlekitten (55) · 6 years ago