If there is any single truth that a luck-seeker should comprehend above all others, it is that life is disorderly and cannot be lived successfully according to a plan. No matter how fine and flexible a plan one might devise, there will be time when the restless tides of life will make that plan unworkable. No matter, what rules one might set up for oneself, there will be situations in which observance of those rules is difficult or just plain impossible.

And so it is with the thirteen techniques of lucky positioning. Don’t expect to be able to apply all of them all the time. Life will inevitably back you into corners in which, against your will and judgment, you will find yourself violating one rule or another. Don’t be upset about this. It is the way life is.

I never met anybody who practiced all thirteen techniques all the time. A consistently lucky person is somebody who practices most of them most of the time and, when breaking the rules, doesn’t break them seriously. By contrast, unlucky people practice few of the techniques and tend to break the rules often and for long periods of time.

If you seek good luck, it should be your aim to become adept with all thirteen techniques. Keep them in mind all the time. Review them often. But don’t give up on yourself if you sometimes find yourself failing to act in the right way.

All the world’s major religions realized centuries ago that life cannot be lived in a straight line. Christians, Jews, Moslems, Hindus – all have codes of conduct that they try to live by. The codes are alike in some respects, unlike in others. But on one thing they agree : human life being what its is, perfection is all but impossible. Only saints ever achieve it. Even the least tolerant Islamic sects allow that mortals are bound to stray from time to time. In the final reckoning, religious leaders assure us nobody will hold it against us if we fail to achieve perfection. What will count is how hard we try.

And so it is for the luck-seeker. It is unlikely that you will achieve total mastery of the thirteen techniques. But if you achieve even a moderately good degree of adeptness with them, you may be astounded by the results.

For it doesn’t usually require a drastic change in anybody’s life to change his or her luck. Sometimes, all that is required is application of a single technique that was previously being ignored.

It can happen, for instance, with the Third Technique, risk spooking. James Sullivan, a New York City employee, is one man who will vouch for the exciting possibilities inherent in this technique. He was approaching retirement when, for reasons that he could never explain satisfactorily later, the thought came to him one day that he hadn’t been risking enough. He had been a combat infantryman in World War II, but since then his life had been unexciting and not especially lucky. The most money he had ever had in his hand was a city check from $800 in accumulated back pay.

Then, out of the blue, on a day in May, he decided to place a bet on a horse. He and his wife had been out shopping. When the thought hit him, she was fully in favor of it. They found an office of New York’s Offtrack Betting Corporation. A clerk had to explain the bets and procedures to them, since neither had ever been inside an OTB office before. One long-shot bet involved picking winners of four harness races at Yonkers Raceway. The cost of the bet was $3. As the Third Technique teaches, if an amount to be placed at risk is that trivial, you might as well go ahead and risk it.

Sullivan picked his winners by use of random numbers. The number he used were the last four digits of his Army serial number, 5683. As he explained later at an OTB press conference, this was as good a horse-picking system as any for him. He knew nothing about horses – indeed had never in his life been to harness racetrack.

He won $128,488. Lucky? Of course. But before he could enjoy the luck, he had to take the risk.

The Second Technique, fast-flow orientation, can also produce fast, startling results of that kind. If you have been keeping yourself hidden and then suddenly thrust yourself into the fast flow, your life can explode with serendipitous events.

Or consider the possibilities inherent in the Twelfth Technique, the juggling act. Until now, perhaps, you have been depending on only one activity or a limited few to bring you luck. Who knows what might happen if you double your range of interests in work and play?

One good way to get started on luck improvement is to ask yourself which technique has been most notably lacking in your approach to life. If you consider yourself less lucky that you would like to be – which is presumably why you have been reading this book – then spend some time analyzing your life. What have you failed to do or not done right?

Almost everybody can identify some prominent failing – even those who consider themselves generally lucky. Ask yourself what your main problem with luck has been. Have you let lucky breaks pass you through an unwillingness to take the zigzag path? Have you become mired in stagnant ventures because you didn’t know how to practice luck selection? Have you let a potential destiny partner vanish over the horizon? Go down the list of techniques and try to identify the one or ones you most need to work on. And then concentrate your attention there.

A good exercise that you can prescribe for yourself over the coming year – it’s not only useful but is also enjoyable – is to read or reread some of the world’s great novels and plays with the thirteen techniques in mind. Pay special attention to stories with unlucky outcomes. What technique or techniques could have produced a lucky outcome instead?

This is an excuse you were never taught in a high school or college English literature class. What you were taught back there, as we have noted before in this book, was to look for “tragic flaws.” Tragedy, as taught in school and college, isn’t supposed to have any connection with bad luck. But now you have an opportunity to revisit your favorite tales and look at them in a new way. Look for the working of luck, good and bad. You will discover that many a character does have a kind of tragic flaw, but not precisely the kind your Eng. Lit. 101 professor was talking about. What brings a character to his or her doom as often as not is bad luck brought about by a persistent failure to apply one or two of the thirteen techniques.

Dombey and Son is my favorite Charles Dickens novel, for example. It is written in a minor key but avoids excessive sentimentality – which is unusual for Dickens. It is probably the best feminist novel ever written.

It is the story of a man, Dombey who fails to apply the Sixth and Thirteenth Technique: fails to follow a zigzag path and then alienates his destiny partner. Dombey runs a moderately prosperous importing business. He drams of the day when hiss son will join him at the firm’s helm. When the boy falls ill and dies, Dombey is devastated. He never realizes that his daughter Florence, a loving and solidly capable young woman, could be the “and Son” of the firm just as well as the boy could have – indeed, is in all respects the better qualified of the two.

Dombey allows bad luck to become worse luck. Hit by the bad luck of his son’s death, he could have zigzagged his way out of it by discarding his original plan and staying alert for new opportunities. Instead, he keeps his gaze riveted on that one dead plan – the plan of turning the firm over to his son. The firm gradually dies of neglect. Florence, the destiny partner who could have solved all Dombey’s problems, is never given the chance to try.

Another grand story with an excellent illustration of luck’s workings is John P. Marquand’s Point of No Return. It is a tale of the Fourth Technique, run cutting.

The hero of the novel is Charles Gray, a young man struggling up the executive ladder in a bank. Much of the story is a flashback to his memories of his father, John, whose tragic flaw was his inability or unwillingness to apply the Fourth Technique. Joh, an ineffectual dreamer, came into a modest inheritance in the mid-1920s and parlayed it to $350,000 in the soaring stock market of that period. His son urged him to cash at least some of the winnings out of the market before the run of luck ended, but John kept putting that off. When the run did end in the fall of 1929, John was wiped out instantly. He committed suicide.

Remembering this tragic event, Charles does a lot of thinking about luck – particularly the difficulty of abandoning runs before they have reached their peaks. He concludes that the most valuable rule in the conduct of his life will be what he calls “knowing when to stop” – what we call run cutting.

But of all the techniques, the one that stands out most starkly in works of fiction, particularly tragic works, is the Fifth. This, you’ll recall, is the technique of luck selection – getting out of hard-luck ventures before they trap you. Thousands of plays, novels, movies, and TV dramas have been built on the theme of a character who fails to apply this technique. The result of this failure can be lifelong entrapment in bad luck. This gloomy outcome is, of course, rich in dramatic possibilities – which is why authors and playwrights love it so much.

We’ve looked at Anna Karenina before in the book. She can see early in her long affair with Count Vronsky that it can’t work, but she is unwilling to abandon what she has invested in it; and the longer she stays, the bigger the investment gets. She finally has to escape by throwing herself under the wheels of a train. Emma, the heroine of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, lets herself get stuck in a similar hard luck situation and finally has to seek the same escape. For a story of a man trapped in a love relationship that he could have abandoned easily when it first began to sour, read Swann’s Way, the first volume of Proust’s massive Remembrance of Things Past.

Fiction is also replete with situations in which bad luck cannot be discarded so easily. Gone with the Wind  is a fine example. Scarlett O’Hara might have avoided all her problems by walking away from the hard-luck situation when it first presented itself to her. She might have sold the family plantation for a low price, swallowed the loss, taken the cash and gone off to seek better luck elsewhere. But that, of course, would not have been as easy to do as it is to say. That is often the dilemma of the Fifth Technique.

Reading such stories is instructive for the luck-seeker, for you can ask yourself, “How would I have avoided bad luck in this situation?” If I had been at Tara when Scarlett’s adventure began and if she had asked my advice, I would have said, “Sell out fast.” But others might feel that Scarlett’s material and emotional investment in Tara was too big to abandon for an unknown future. The case illustrates the fact that some luck decisions are easier to arrive at than others. By testing your own reactions to such a situation in fiction, you can prepare yourself for a possible future time when you will be required to handle a similar dilemma in real life.

Finally, fiction will you think about the kind of luck that you can’t do anything about.

No matter how well you practice the thirteen techniques, you can still be brought to your knees by cancer, shot by a burglar, or barbecued by a nuclear bomb.

Conversely, though you practice none of the techniques and have been leading a generally luckless life, you can still be hit unexpectedly by a bolt of good fortune from nowhere. Like the citizens of Spring Hill, Tennessee. They were sitting around in their houses, minding their own business, when General Motors suddenly announced in 1985 that it was going to build its giant new Saturn automobile plant in Spring Hill. The startled citizens found themselves sitting on a real-estate goldmine. The market value of of some houses and plots of land tripled in a few weeks.

Nice? Yes.

What can you do about it? Nothing.

Luck happens whether we invite it to or not. Good luck and bad luck are always weaving themselves into human lives, leaving some people happy and others sad and others dead. The world of fiction teems with characters who are crippled or killed by disease, like Dombey’s son – or who, conversely, are granted sudden good fortune without making any special luck-improvement efforts of their own. Critics often complain that such lucky and unlucky events spring from laziness on the author’s part. It’s true that it is easier to manipulate characters by blind luck than to construct elaborate plots in which their good or bad fates result from purposive human action. But are such luck-dominated outcomes unbelievable or untrue in real life? Does it strain credulity to read about Dombey’s boy dying for no good reason? Not at all. That is exactly what real life is like.

Your own life was undoubtedly influenced by luck before you ever picked up this book and luck would have gone on pushing you around no matter what you might have read or thought. But now you have the thirteen techniques at your command. Your relationship to luck from now will be different.

You have no guarantees, as we’ve seen. What you do have is an edge.

Good luck!