We had better define our term before we go further. So:
Luck (noun): Events that influence your life but are not your making.
Such events – good luck and bad luck – are the main shaping forces of human life. If you believe you are in perfect control of your life, you are kidding yourself.
You owe your very existence to a chancy event that happened before you were born: the coming together of your mother and father. How did they first meet? You will almost certainly discover that it was by chance. Because of that random events, you are alive today. The random mixing of chromosomes dictated your sex, your size, the color of your skin and eyes, the shape of your nose, your predisposition to certain diseases, and a host of other factors that you had no control of, factors that have already influenced your life heavily and will go on influencing it until it ends.
Other lucky and unlucky events have occurred, or will occur, during your lifetime. Events such as winning a million-dollar lottery prize; getting killed in an air crash; falling into a golden career opportunity through somebody you meet at a party; contracting cancer; stumbling into a life-changing love affair through a mix-up in theatre seats, losing your shirt in a stock market crash. Events of this nature can profoundly affect your life but aren’t of your making; and all of them, hence, fit our definition of “luck”.
Luck is one of the most important elements in men’s and women’s lives. Indeed, in many lives it is unequivocally the most important. Yet, strangely, people don’t talk about it much. In fact, most people are like William Hoffman, the gambler, and his father, the coach: They are reluctant to acknowledge luck’s huge influence.
It will be useful to take a brief look at this reluctance. You must clear it out of your way before you can being the process of changing your luck.
Why do people deny the role of luck? For one thing, we hate to think we are at the mercy of random happenings. We prefer to stay snugly wrapped in the illusion that we control our own destinies.
Life seems safer when I can say to myself, “The future will happen as I plan it.” It won’t , of course. Deep inside, we all know it won’t. But the truth is too scary to contemplate without an illusion to struggle up against.
Another reason why we prefer not to discuss luck’s role is that it diminishes us and steals our dignity. Go to your local library and pick up any stage or screen star’s autobiography. How did this man or woman rise to such an exalted position? Why, by being smart, talented, courageous, and resolute, of course. And lucky? You aren’t likely to find the word mentioned.
What the star fails to emphasize is that he or she began the long climb in competition with thousands of other smart, talented young hopefuls. We don’t know their names today because they didn’t get the big break. Of all those deserving your aspirant, only one was lucky enough to be slinging hash in a diner when a great producer stepped in for a bowl of chilli.
Though it is unusually obvious to any astute reader that the star’s success was largely a result of blind luck, the star naturally does not dwell on the fact. You will hardly ever find a movie autobiography that says, “I’m really just an ordinary clod. I’m no more beautiful, talented or resolute than all those competitors whose names you don’t know. In fact a lot of them would look better on movie screen that I don. “The only thing they didn’t have was luck. Such a confession would diminish the star’s luminosity.
The reluctance to talk about luck isn’t confined to the theatrical business, of course. All successful people would avoid diminishment in the same way. Business executives do it in explaining how they got to be chairman of the board. Military officers do it in recalling how they won great battles. Politicians do it in listing the things that went right during their time in office. Luck, if mentioned at all, is never emphasized.
You will never see a president of the United States standing in front of a TV camera and saying, “Well folks, nobody as the faintest idea of how it happened, but during my term at the White House, no new wars have broken out and the unemployment rate dropped. I’m one of the luckiest presidents you’ll ever have!”
Nor will you ever hear a stock market speculator admit that his great killing, the one that made him rich, was the result of sheer luck. After the fact, he will construct a chain of reasoning to demonstrate how cleverly he figured everything out.
Still other reasons for denying luck’s role lie embedded at odd angles in the Work Ethic, also known as the Protestant or Puritan Ethic. We are taught from kindergarten on that we’re supposed to make our way in life by hard work, perseverance, fortitude, and all those grindstony things. If, instead, we make it by blind luck, we’re ashamed to say so in public – or even to admit it to ourselves
Conversely, if we are walloped by bad luck, our Puritan heritage encourages us to think it’s probably our own fault. We are supposedly responsible for our own outcomes, whether good or bad.
“Character is destiny,” Heraclitus wrote some twenty-five centuries ago. Great stacks of plays, novels, movies, and TV dramas have since tried to prove the point. They haven’t succeeded because it is unprovable. The best you can say of it is that, in some lives, it is half true. If I’m unlucky enough to be killed by a drunk driver on the highway, my destiny has nothing to do with my character. I might have been a saint or a sinner, a great philosopher or a bumbling nincompoop. None of that matters. My destiny has arrived. I’m dead.
Despite its obvious weakness, Heraclitus’s aphorism survives, deeply embedded in our cultural consciousness. If thing go wrong in your life, you aren’t supposed to blame bad luck. Instead, you’re supposed to look for the reasons inside yourself.
Those inside-the-self reasons may be pretty hard to find. Let’s say you’re unemployed. Why? Because the company you worked for went bankrupt. The debacle wasn’t in any way your fault; it was just bad luck. But if you offer that as the reason for your jobless state, people will mutter behind your back that you are only whining or making excuses. They will suspect that the real reason for your joblessness is a personal flaw of some kind.
Or perhaps your hunt for a new job has been frustrated by prejudice based no race, ethnic origin, or age. That isn’t your fault, either, it is just more bad luck. But if you say that’s what it is, only a few will believe you.
We are culturally conditioned to deny the role of luck. The search for those elusive inside-the-self reasons even clouds our understanding of literature. All American and European kids (and for all I know, Russian and Chinese kids, too) get the “tragic flaw” theory of great literature laid on them in high school or college. This theory holds that in Shakespeare’s tragedies or Dostoevsky’s novels or the epic poems of Homer, the heroes and heroines always bring their troubles on themselves through some failing of their character. Teachers and professors insist that this is so, and many generations of kids have been given the same choice: agree or flunk.
The fact is, however, that you have to look pretty hard to find those “tragic flaws” that supposedly are behind the tragic happenings. There is no good evidence that either Homer or Shakespeare, for example, bought this goofy theory. In the Iliad, much of what happens is brought about by the manipulations of the gods – in other words, by good and bad luck that the human characters have no control of. Shakespeare’s tragedies are similar. Hamlet opens with the hero in a fix because of events he had nothing to do with. It ends with nearly everybody dead by mistake – a blithe of bloody blunders. It isn’t a play about tragic flaws. It is a play about bad luck.
Why do English professors deny it? A good answer was offered recently by Phyllis Rose, a professor of English at Wesleyan University and no fan of he “tragic flaw” notion. Students are taught that the character flaw is a necessary ingredient of tragedy, Professor Rose wrote in The New York Times: “If the hero or heroine didn’t have a flaw, it wouldn’t be tragic because it wouldn’t ‘mean’ anything. It would just be bad luck.”
She added, wryly, “To convince students that bad luck isn’t tragic must take some fancy teaching,” But that is what is taught, and most people seem to buy the notion. And now, we have uncovered yet another reason why the role of luck in human experience is so persistently denied. Luck isn’t “meaningful” enough. We yearn for life to have meaning. Acknowledging luck’s role takes half the meaning out of it.
If I do wrong and come to a bad end as a direct result of my own wickedness or weakness, the episode is supposed to teach some kind of lesson to me and others. But if I’m peacefully walking along the street and get run over by a truck, nobody learns anything.
Life is like that much of the time: completely random and meaningless. Not only college English professors but all the rest of us are uncomfortable with that fact. But it is a fact you must look square in the eye if you want to do something about your luck.
The first step toward improving your luck is to acknowledge that it exists. That brings us to the First Technique of Lucky Positioning.