The Supreme Insult

William S. Hoffman was a gambler but not a successful one. He wrote a book about his life entitled The Loser. Trying to sort out the reasons whey he was never able to make it, he arrived at a very interesting conclusion: He failed because he tried to deny the role of luck in his life.

He had learned this unproductive and dangerous attitude from his father, an athletic coach. The senior Hoffman liked to pep talk his teams with windy pronouncements derived from the Work Ethic. One of his favorite was: “If you’re good, you don’t need luck.”

What nonsense.

Of course you need luck. IT doesn’t matter how good a football player you are. If you have the bad luck to trip on a loose stair number and sprain your ankle the night before the big game, none of your hard-earned strength and skills are going to do you the least bit of good. All those hours of practice, all that admirable grit and determination – al are down the drain. The coach can recite Work Ethic apothegms at you until he is blue in the face, but he cannot change the facts.

It isn’t enough just to be good. You’ve got to be lucky, too.

The junior Hoffman, the gambler, evidently listened too seriously to this father’s bad advice. He thought he could become a successful gambler through sheer hard work. All he had to do, young Hoffman believed, was apply himself to an assiduous study of horses, cards or dice. “If you’re good you don’t need luck.” Having become good, he figured, he would be in a position to conquer the world.

That was what he thought. Things didn’t work according to plan. Bad luck hit him. He wasn’t prepared to handle it. He went broke.

You have got to have good luck. Without it, nothing will work right for you. Good luck is the essential basic component of success, no matter what your personal definition of “success” may be.

What is it you want from life? To be rich? Famous? Respected in a profession? Happily married? Well loved? Whatever your goals may be, have you achieved them? It is unlikely you would be reading this book if your answer were yes.

Nearly all of us would have to answer no, we have not yet achieved our goals. And why not? Apply the question to your own life. What is it that has prevented you from getting where you want to be? Is it that you aren’t good enough? Or simply that you haven’t been lucky enough?

The second answer – not lucky enough – is by far the more likely to be the truth. Most of us are “good” in one way or another – good enough, as often as not, to reach whatever goals we have wished to set for ourselves. We have failed to reach those goals largely because of a lack of luck.

There are a number of ways to demonstrate this truth to yourself. It was emphasized strongly for me during a recent period when, quite by chance, I went to see a series of plays performed by amateur theatrical groups in my home county. Many of the groups’ members told me that they had dreamed of acting professionally but were still waiting for the big break – or had given up waiting. I asked myself why the big break had never come their way. Lack of talent? Certainly not, in most cases. These men and women were at least as good as the stars we see every week on TV or at the movies. What was the difference, then? Why had the starts soared to a pinnacle of success while thousands of other actors and actresses, equally good, were never able to climb higher than a hometown dramatic club?

There was only one answer: luck. Being in the right place at the right time. Knowing somebody who knew somebody.

Being good simply is not enough.

Luck. It blunders in and out of our lives, unbidden, unexpected, sometimes welcome and sometimes not. It plays a role in all our affairs, often the commanding role. No matter how carefully you design your life, you cannot know how that design will be changed by the working of random events. You can only know the events will occur. You can only wait for them and hope they are in your favor.

Luck is the supreme insult to human reason. You can’t ignore it, yet you can’t plan for it. Man’s grandest and most meticulous designs will fail if they are hit with bad luck, but the silliest ventures will succeed with good luck. Misfortune is always striking good people who don’t deserve it, while many a scoundrel dies rich and happy. Whenever we think we have some answers, luck is there to mock us.

Is there anything to be made of it? Anything sensible to be said of it? Anything useful to be done about it?

Surprisingly, yes, there is. Probably more than you think.

You cannot control your luck in a precise way. You cannot say, “I want the next card I draw to be the queen of diamonds,” and have any reasonable expectation of that outcome. Luck isn’t amenable to fine-tuning of that kind. To hope for such control is to dream of magic. It doesn’t happen.

But you can bring about a substantial and even startling improvement in the quality of your luck. You can turn it from mostly bad to mostly good, from pretty good to better. Wherever you need luck and have been seeking it – in investments, gambling, career, love, friendships – you can upgrade your chances of becoming one of life’s winners.

I know this is true because I’ve seen it happen. The luck-changing precepts you are about to study – the thirteen techniques of lucky positioning – are not just wisps of gassy theory. They were not invented by a bearded shrink sitting in his study, puffing on his pipe. Instead, they are derived from direct observations of men’s and women’s lives.

The lucky and the unlucky: What are the differences between them? What do the lucky know, what do they do, that the unlucky don’t? Are they lucky because they have some special ways of handling life or because – well, just because they’re lucky?

I’ve been pursuing the answers to these questions for more than twenty years.