Just My Luck!
posted: January 31st, 2010
I’m writing this post because I’ve been thinking about LUCK lately and whether we can affect it (or not).
I’m definitely not an expert on the subject – but through some of my observations I’ve got a few questions & scenarios I’d like to share and I’m hoping I may get some answers and viewpoints from you.
So what exactly is luck?
According to Dictionary.com it’s “the force that seems to operate for good or ill in a person’s life, as in shaping circumstances, events, or opportunities”
My first real prolonged experience of this good ‘force’ was as a Fresher at University in Liverpool.
I seemed to have loads of luck on my side and was actually known by my housemates as “The Lucky *Manc”!
When we applied for student loans, mine came first, when we compared timetables for the semester I only had to attend class on Tuesdays and Thursdays (I had Monday, Wednesday and Friday off)! And when we were assigned our rooms in our campus house I got the best one at the top of our house.
Instead of finding a job in a pub or bar like everyone else I decided to ‘try my luck’ and invested my entire student loan into a weekly nightclub event.
It was a roaring success from the word ‘go’ and came with both financial and social ‘rewards’ :-)
Basically whenever I needed something it seemed to appear and this ‘Lucky Manc’ was on a roll.
But why was this?
Was it anything to do with the positive state of mind at the time? I mean I was seriously buzzing! When I’d finished school I had made the mistake of going straight into a dead end, boring job and this University life was complete heaven in comparison! And this newfound luck seemed to follow happiness and when people called me lucky it become a self-fulfilling prophecy, which made me even happier…
Don’t get me wrong it didn’t last forever, the ‘student bubble’ did burst and I’ve had my serious knocks since then which have more than brought me back down to earth with a bump!
I do however still go through some very good patches.
So what causes these lucky patches?
Why do some people appear to get all the luck?
Where do the serious knocks come from?
I couldn’t possibly attempt to answer all of this in one blog even if I did know the answers but I will take a (very) brief look at some of the angles.
First of all let’s look at those self-confessed unlucky ones:
A new tenant recently moved into a property I own and I’ve noticed she uses very negative language and continuously puts herself down whenever I see her. She even warned me (just before she moved in) how unlucky she was. Great!
She is a very clever, sophisticated woman so why has she got this attitude? Has she been conditioned from an early age & developed a bad habit or has she had one too many knocks and lost some of her confidence? Or are the Gods just pissed off with her and she is destined to live an unlucky life? Who knows?
She was true to her word though: Within 10 hours of moving into the house the previously untarnished en-suite bathroom had flooded and subsequently ruined the carpet in the main bedroom.
Since then she has had a further leak in the other bathroom that was fixed but then came raging back twice as bad the following week. She has had frozen water pipes and a broken boiler and has only been living there for 2 months.
Did she attract this with her attitude or was it just bad luck? Did I attract her because of my attitude or is it just bad luck on my part? I was the one who had to pay for the fixes remember!
Over the last year, which has been a ‘testing’ year for many, I’ve explored this subject and I’ve tried to look at it from different viewpoints.
It’s a very tricky subject though and I definitely don’t want to go too deep but lets look at a few possibilities:
Bear with me, because I’m no psychologist or neurologist or any other ‘ist’ for that matter, but lets look at it from a purely scientific and logical level:
The human brain can (apparently) consciously assimilate 7 bits of information per second in average conditions – I think I remember reading this somewhere….
…If this is the case then it’s probably fair to say that if you are having a bad day, thinking negative thoughts & feeling pretty closed, then your brain will probably be less useful right?
…So lets say the brain only takes in 5 bits of information per second for that day, which means you would be missing around 172,000 bits of information.
So on a good day when your brain is thinking positive thoughts is totally open, alert and fully focussed it would have the opposite of the negative thoughts and retain more information than normal, right? So for this example let’s say 9 bits per second (again I read it somewhere). If this were true then a positive brain would take in about 350,000 more bits of information per day, which over a good week adds up to a lot of information.
So the law of ‘cause and effect’ states that if we do something (action) then we can expect a result. If this is the case then the positive brain would spot more opportunities, allowing it to be more creative, willing to ‘do’ more and be more communicative with others, which would ‘probably’ give the owner of the brain more confidence allowing them to ‘take more risks’, face fear and expand their comfort zone & thus expand their universe.
Also if we’re taking in more information then we are probably going to be making more informed decisions and therefore whatever we are doing will be done smarter and probably with more vigour, which means the result will probably be better & much more inspired.
When we are buzzing and in our flow things seem easier and results happen quicker and it could seem to people on the outside that we are luckier.
There has been a huge buzz around the ‘law of attraction’ over the last few years & people who believe in the law of attraction believe that if we are thinking and (more importantly) feeling on a certain frequency (positive or negative) then the universe will respond with results that match this frequency which in turn feed the thoughts & feelings which create results which match the frequency and so on and so forth….
This again is just another view of the (currently) inexplicable phenomenon of ‘luck’
I certainly don’t understand how we attract ‘bad’ things or ‘bad’ people into our lives (yet) and some of the atrocities that happen are just unfathomable but I do know that more good stuff happens to me when I’m open, inspired, focussed, alert, happy and most importantly: when I take action.
So why don’t I do all the above all of the time?
WHO KNOWS?
It’s definitely work in progress though! ;-)
*Manc is short for Mancunian – a dude from Manchester
EntrepreneurSolo
31.01.10
Wasn’t it Woody Allen who said then 80% of good luck comes from just turning up or am I paraphrasing wrong there.
Being open to stuff allows you to walk the path. Negative people usually don’t go down the path because of fear, doubt or just lack of what we call in Spain “Cojones” and therefore although they may never fail miserably they ultimately will never succeed and will shoot for mediocrity.
Look at the situation at University, you showed up. It could have gone horribly wrong but you took the punt. Surely the law of averages says that you will be successful in some of the ventures you do if you do a lot!
Robert J. Fischer
31.01.10
Kenny,
I am sorry to say that there really is no such thing as luck. There is a wonderful book called Talent is Overated which details how succeful people as diverse as Jerry Rice, Bill Gates and the Beetles were succesful through extraordinary prepartion. But it was no luck.
In the long run, the law of numbers will get all of us. So the best thing we can do is get the odds on our favor.
Planned serendipity is the conscious preparation for an unforseen fortunate occurance. This will lead much farther than “attraction”.
Dee Harrison
31.01.10
Thought provoking post Kenny.
Have just finished reading ‘Change The Way You See Everything’ (Cramer & Wasiak) which talks about Asset Based Thinking v Deficit Based Thinking and provides ideas about switching from one to the other.
I know there are all sorts of rational explanations about luck/synchonicity/serendipity from those who are ‘ists’ but I do rather like the idea of pure luck and chance………. adds spice to life!!
Kenny
31.01.10
Just ordered: ‘Change The Way You See Everything’ (Cramer & Wasiak)
Thanks for the tip
Lisa Hartwell
31.01.10
This is something I have mulled over a lot. It definitely isn’t a case of “bad things happen to bad people”. From my experience a person’s attitude simply makes it seem like they are more lucky than others.
I work with someone who I have always believed to have many good things happen to her but in her mind life is always dealing her something nasty. Things do tend to go wrong for her (the sort of things that happened to your tenant) but overall she has a great life – but she can’t see beyond the little things and dwells on them constantly.
She looks at me and considers me to be a lucky person, and most of the time I feel lucky. Certainly I have a lot to be thankful for. But, if an outsider compared our lives over the past few years without knowing us and our personalities, they would say I’d had the crappy time and she should be in clover!
So, I don’t know whether people “attract” luck as such, I just think that it’s about the way we view life and whether we see and grasp the opportunities that come our way.
Kenny
31.01.10
Yep some great points Lisa, I guess the way we hold our perspectives plays a big role in this.
EntrepreneurSolo
31.01.10
Also ordered the book Dee. Thanks for the heads up on it.
A Web Developer
02.03.10
If we look at Google they say there is no such thing as luck. This is why the they use the iconic “I’m feeling lucky” button that just takes you to the #1 on Google.
They are mathmaticians and experts at search and perform data results based on complex maths not luck :-)
Steve Williams
Kenny
02.03.10
Yes the Google PHD Boys and Gals will definitely back the randomness theory!
Rich Russell
09.03.10
“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Hamlet
Nothing has any inherent meaning. The same stuff happens to us all, it’s just how you deal with it.
We don’t attract ‘luck’, we attract what we spend most of our time thinking about. If you think about what you want, that is what you get.
And if you are always complaining about how bad things are…
Disclaimer: I tried thinking about Sandra Bullock and she is not here, so this may not work 100% of the time.
Rich
Nicholas Ramsden
26.03.10
I had woman work for me very briefly. I gave her the job in part because I felt sorry for her. She’d experienced a lot of “bad luck” and clearly needed a break.
It turned out that she was a proper miserable bitch! She had a really negative attitude and everything she was asked to do was real problem for her. During her brief time with me she continued to experience further bad luck in her personal life. She left after deciding that the work was too problematic for her.
I came to the clear conclusion that she was ‘unlucky’ because she was miserable, not miserable because she was unlucky!
She serves as an example to me of how not to live your life.
Leave a Reply