RE: Evening Reflection: Do we "create" our Own Luck?
This was a topic that I actually just recently had a conversation about right here on steemit.
The gist of my idea is that luck != chance. Luck is emotional reaction to chance occurrences. Chance is just math and statistics. To shamelessly steal from myself, here’s the comment in its entirety:
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.”
Appreciate you sharing your previous post/comment. I'm somewhat in agreement with what (I think) you're driving at here... that luck is a "response" to a simple statistical event.
I'll share a story of my own here... I played a lot of golf when I was younger. One time I found myself in a fairly significant tournament, playing with this young Belgian guy, Pierre... we were both pretty young at the time. Anyway, we're going along in the 3rd round of a 4-round event and are pretty much having identical rounds, while both catching up to the field, overall.
Anyway, point here... on the 15th hole, Pierre hits a real "shit shot" from the tee; it goes in the woods; then the unmistakable sound of the ball hitting a tile roof. And then... evidently it hit that roof at such an angle the ball bounced right back to the middle of the fairway. "You're a lucky guy!" I tell him, and he agrees.
So I tee it up and hit my shot; it purdyneer ("pretty near") perfect down the middle of the fairway. Where it hits a sprinkler head (or maybe a stray rock?) and takes a sky high 90-degree right bounce, into the woods and into someone's yard... out of play.
If you go to the root of the incident, these were merely a couple of "events." And yet, I felt massively unlucky, while Pierre felt incredibly lucky.
Yep, that ties into my feeling perfectly! (And what a story, I can see why you can still recall it so easily this many years later!)
You both experienced an extremely unlikely event. But you both felt differently about it.
Now as to whether or not there’s some kind of deeper meaning, personal qualities, or cosmic karma driving all this... I’ll leave that to everyone else to decide 😆
The Karma factor is often an interesting thing for me... but I can't ever justify applying it to single events... but I start speculating, when someone has a protracted series of similar events happen.
Like someone tries every conceivable way to make something work for them, but an endless series of both personal and global hazards prevent them from getting to their objective. I'm trying to think of an example... but they escape me, for the moment.