How to be lucky?
What does being lucky feel like? I don't know whether I am lucky or not based on my life so far. I’ve had dull moments, and I’ve had great moments. There were times when I felt I might die of grief, and then there were periods of extreme joy.
Assuming the occurrence of good things can be considered good luck, and bad things as bad luck, shall we categorize all the good things that happened to us as good luck and bad things as bad luck?
That doesn’t sound like luck but more like routine life events. After all, life events are either good or bad. Sometimes, they’re mundane, but for ease of categorization, we could consider “not bad” as good.
Luck, however, seems more like an extreme event in life—winning a lottery or meeting with a freak accident.
So, we can assume that the occurrence of an extreme event—good or bad—can be called luck. But when we talk about extreme events, are we interpreting something eventual as extreme simply because we didn’t see it coming?
For instance, being jailed for buying drugs from the streets—someone could do it for years until one day they’re caught by a cop. Would that be considered bad luck?
On the other hand, if someone buys a lottery ticket for ten years before winning the biggest prize in the country, would that be considered good luck?
An action taken with regularity can’t really be considered extreme, even if the consequences are significant. The outcome might be dramatic, but if the action that triggered it was consistent, then the extreme outcome becomes more of an eventuality.
For example, if you buy drugs every day from the streets, your probability of getting caught increases with every iteration.
Is luck, then, merely an act of probability? Behind every choice we make, there’s an outcome we hope for. That outcome isn’t guaranteed but is certainly expected.
We also have an internal sense of that outcome’s likelihood—a sort of internal probability radar. We know certain choices have a very low chance of producing the desired outcome.
For example, when we buy a lottery ticket, we know there’s little chance of winning, but we still make the effort. If we win, we call it luck; if we lose, we don’t feel as bad because our internal probability meter already set our expectations.
Does this mean luck is about the materialization of an outcome with the least probability? If your first essay on social media goes viral, if your first stock becomes a multibagger, or if your first car ride with friends turns into a freak accident, we might consider such events extreme.
By our earlier definition, extreme events can be classified as luck—good or bad.
But what if you wrote a hundred essays on social media before one went viral? What if you’d taken hundreds of car rides before meeting with an accident? Would those events still qualify as luck?
By our another definition of probability, regardless of the extremity of the outcome, if the action triggering that outcome was consistently present, then the outcome becomes an eventuality due to increased probability.
This brings us back to square one. On one hand, we safely assume extreme events as luck. On the other, repeated actions triggering those events don’t feel like luck.
So, it’s not the events—positive or negative—but the materialization of a low-probability outcome that we consider extreme and classify as luck.
If we see someone living the life of our dreams, can we call them lucky?
To do so, we’d have to ignore all the regular, non-extreme events in their life. By our earlier definition, only extreme events with low probability can be considered luck.
Most events—a good job, good business, a good spouse, a happy family—don’t qualify because they aren’t the result of extreme outcomes.
For instance, you don’t simply land a good job. You might get an interview through a reference, but even that requires the ability to maintain good relationships, which is only possible if you have good values. It’s a chain of events, not an isolated one.
In the end, we can conclude that luck is the occurrence of extreme events with the lowest probability. It’s not about the event itself but about the iterations of actions behind it that shift the probability curve.
If you increase the iterations of effort toward a desired outcome, you also increase the probability of achieving it. Without quality and repeated efforts, you’d need a lot of luck to succeed, and a lack of success might make you feel unlucky.
To generate luck, then, you need to tilt the probability of the desired outcome in your favor. This is only possible through consistent, quality efforts with positive iterations.
While luck does exist, it’s more mathematical than we might think.