Well, since @coinsandchains beat me to the punch with the quote that your question reminds me of (luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity), I guess I’ll have to be a little more creative!

To me, luck is purely an attitude. Now granted, if you flip a coin, there is a 50-50 chance that it will be heads. Say you have $20 riding on the coin toss being tails. If you win, you’d call that “good luck” but if you lose it’s “bad luck.” But I think this is taking the idea of chance too far. The coin flip results simply are. Your attitude about them is where we get the idea of luck. Luck implies something outside of anyone’s control. But the laws of physics, statistics, and probability govern everything, so as Obi-wan Kenobi said, “in my experience there’s no such thing as luck.”

I have watched gamblers lose their minds at the blackjack table when someone to their right didn’t hit when they were supposed to. That caused everyone to their left to “get a different card than they were meant to get.” In this case you have the opposite problem of “luck” - if they still win it’s good luck but if they lose now it’s the other player’s fault. Really either outcome is pure chance.

Or take Steemit itself for example. Say I spend an equal amount of time on two quality posts and one of them gets Curied and the other does not. There is some chance involved in whether or not a curator sees either post, but so much more is dependent on things that are controlled by other factors besides chance (post quality, subject matter, personal preference, etc.). It is far too easy to say I had “good luck” on the one that got Curied and “bad luck” on the one one that didn’t. It takes all responsibility out of my hands when I chalk things up to luck.

To reference Star Wars again, the droid C-3PO constantly spouted odds. To him, there was no luck either, just probability. A robot would not feel “lucky” at wining the lottery or “unlucky” at being involved in a plane crash. They would simply recognize the relative unlikeliness of each event, with no added emotion coloring their reaction.

So to boil down my argument to a bite sized quote of my own, I would say that “luck is how you fill the emotional gap between chance events and your reaction to them.”

#steemitbloggers