“Seriously, I don’t get it. What, do you shoot luck lasers out your eyes? It’s just hard to picture. And certainly not very cinematic.” – Deadpool 2
Yup. I sure feel that way when I accidentally tell the ticket taker “I love you, too” after she says, “Enjoy the movie.”
One novel I recall reading back when I was in a kid in junior high was Ringworld by Larry Niven. Niven’s fiction has always been great because when he thinks about a subject, he thinks about that subject deeply, and spins off great ideas faster than a nudist nursemaid on nitrates.
In the case of Ringworld, the main idea was about taking all the matter in a solar system and putting a big ring around it. This would have about three million times the surface area of Earth, so if you were kinda bored and needed a weekend project to add a little bit of space to your place, building a ringworld might give you enough room so you didn’t need to rent one of those 8×10 storage units. That might save you $30 a month!
I’ll warn you, if your gym teacher makes you do a lap, it might take several hundred thousand years.
Another view of the Ringworld in motion.
Outside of that huge idea of building solar-system-scale structures, Niven had a dozen others in just that one book (and he did it in other books, too) that made it especially mind bending for a young teenager to read. One of the ideas was about luck.
In the future that Larry Niven had constructed, parents were limited to the number of children they could have, but you could have an extra child if you won a lottery. Teela Brown’s parents won that lottery, and so on – for five generations. In this case, Niven speculated that there might be a gene that made you lucky, and her character was brought into the novel with that genetically-based luck as her superpower, which helped move the plot along in an interesting way.
I hear religious cannibals only eat Catholics on Friday.
The idea (like a lot of Niven’s other ideas) stuck with me for a while. I know that there are people who think that the concept of “luck” is magical thinking. Me? I think that to discard luck as a concept in a Universe as vast as ours describes an unwarranted degree of certainty about how things really work. In fact, when talking with people, I often say, “I’m the luckiest person you know.” I really think that I am a pretty lucky fellow. Some would even call me a jolly. And good.
“He is lucky who realizes that luck is the point where preparation meets opportunity,” was an unattributed saying in a 1912 edition of The Youth’s Companion. That’s a great definition, and it is one that firmly puts you in control of your destiny – most “overnight sensations” work, very hard, for years before success hits. It’s a concept I sell to my kids frequently because the last thing I want is to allow them, for a single second, to feel like they’re victims of life. That gives them an excuse not to perform – and they’ll need to pay for my nursing home, and I want them to be able to afford one with pole dancers.
But we need to face an unpleasant truth: like Teela Brown, some people are just luckier than others.
Can you back that up, John Wilder? Yes, yes I can.
- People are born with different abilities – attractiveness, speed, strength, intelligence, cunning. It’s only on rare occasions that a rogue like me is born with all four. Er, five.
- Many crucial events in history have swung on luck – Lee’s invasion of Maryland was stopped at Antietam in 1862 because a corporal of the 27th Indiana Volunteers found Lee’s invasion plans in an envelope wrapped around three cigars.
- Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because his bacterial slide was accidently infected with a fungus – a penicillin producing fungus.
Talent is normally distributed – it follows a bell curve – most people have average talent, while some have amazing talent. Most people (in the looks department) aren’t 10’s – they’re 5’s, which is, after all, average. But variable amounts of talent don’t account for the huge differences in success some people see. Bill Gates wasn’t the smartest man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the hardest working man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the man born in 1955 with the richest dad.
Virus free is good too, Bill.
But Bill Gates was smart, hardworking, and had a rich dad. And he developed a good system. But he was also the guy who was in the right place at the right time to help create the personal computer business. The luckiest moment of Bill Gates’ life? When IBM© was negotiating with Bill for DOS© for their PCs, and the CEO of IBM said, “Oh, is that Mary Gates’ boy’s company?” Turns out the CEO of IBM® was on the board of the United Way™ with Bill’s mom.
Lucky.
Luck plays a role in your life. If you’re born well, that’s a good start. If you pick the right major at the right time? That’s another step on the way. Get associated with the right things at work? A business that is just the right one at just the right time? Soon enough you’re the CEO.
Lucky Charms® are also part of a complete breakfast, but then again so is a spoon, which is also inedible.
I’m not saying that the CEO is unworthy, but I do think that those who rise to the top should understand that there’s a role for luck as well. Scientific American (LINK) even has an article where a mathematical simulation of talent plus luck equals the creation of the unequal distribution of outcomes we see in the world today where vast amounts of wealth are owned by a small number of people.
Is an unequal distribution an unfair outcome? No, mainly because people make the individual choices that lead them to their fates – very few people are forced to their position in life. If I had made several different choices in my life, could I have been the CEO of a major company? With luck, sure. But I’m sure that whoever got the job is doing fine, as am I, plus I don’t have to live in a big city and wear a tie more than once a year.
And what about lucky breaks that go way beyond probability?
Yup, I think those happen, too. But that’s a future post. If you’re lucky.
Wait, I am the luckiest man alive.
So either one of is is wrong, or one of us must die (like a wolf disobeying the law of the jungle). Or maybe there is something like Schrödinger’s Luckiest Guy so that we can both be the luckiest guy in the world and not be at the same time.
I hate to be the one to check your math, but if people are ranked on a scale of one to ten, then the average is 5.5, so a five would be below average.
So it’s like the Pauli Exclusion Principle, but for luck? Maybe you have an Up spin and I have a Down spin?
On a 1-10 scale, sure, but this one girl called me a “real zero” when I tried to pick up her best friend at prom . . . .
From WebMD:
“On average, each time a man ejaculates he releases nearly 100 million sperm.”
Right off the bat, if your parents were “fixed” by “destiny”, the odds are 100 million to one that you are YOU. And 50M of those possibilities of “you” were of the opposite sex.
But your parents weren’t “fixed” by “destiny”…they BOTH had to beat 100M-to-1 odds to be THEMSELVES.
And so on and so on and on and on and on and on and on back to some extremophile that was formed billions of years ago at the bottom of the ocean at some volcanic thermal vent….
And then we get into a whole other level of “coincidences”. My life is totally different because I went to a particular high-school football game with my sister decades ago instead of staying home and watching TV. What’s your pivot points of destiny?
It is an incomprehensible level of luck for YOU to be HERE right NOW.
“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.”
-Neal Stephenson
The future looks extremely grim.
There are no more free countries.
No country has religious freedom, free speech, gun rights, or protection from warrantless searches, forfeiture, indefinite detention, torture, or extrajudicial assassination.
You might have slightly more freedom in Ireland or Switzerland, but soon the whole world will look like North Korea.
People in Venezuela, China, Vietnam, and Cuba seem to deal with tyranny by just ignoring it and living their lives, but making plans are difficult because everything is illegal and you can be arrested at anytime.
https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
Fuck you, bot!!
I’ve been the beneficiary of highly improbable luck, and I hope there are now people who consider themselves lucky for knowing me. But, as the citation said, “preparation meeets opportunity”. Without the irrational, blind faith that preparation would, some day, meet opportunity, I’d be a much poorer man (in several dimensions).
I’m liking the trend I see – readers here seem to (fake shocked face) be positive people who feel self-confident and good about themselves. Amazing!
If I wanted to correspond with you do you have an contact address or link associated with the site?
Sure! movingnorth@gmail.com, unless you’re a bill collector, in which case I’d suggest bill@microsoft.com, because he’d be the Bill I’d collect.
While I am dubious that one can cultivate consistent good luck, I have met people who appear to be more or less consistently lucky. I make a point to be happy for them.
I do believe however, that one can make an attempt at avoiding bad luck, Don’t doing stupid things, have a rational & organized decision making process, “war-game” big decision alternatives, be somewhat pessimistic, avoid dark alleys, etc.
By minimizing potential bad luck, your random good luck should stand out more.
Then again, focus, hard work, playing by the rules, attention to detail, having a plan and following through…in other words, successful attributes, might just be (mis)interpreted by some others as just good luck, and therefore spawns jealousy.
That’s true, and very well stated. I have heard, “Why did you do so well on that test?” after spending about 40 hours studying for it. You know, classic luck.
Off topic: I’ve been reading my way through your Wilder By Far blog (I’m at 2009 🙁 ). It’s great fun. And thanks to that I got to read the whole “Guy who invented BoardGameGeek blog.
If you had a book, I’d buy it. If you had a P.O. Box, I’d send a check. Thanks for the reading enjoyment
Thank you!!!! I’ve been toying with some t-shirt ideas, and at one point I was thinking that with the (checks) hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written that there might be 70,000 or so good ones on topic to present as a book. My high school English teacher is really wanting to buy a copy, which is kinda like your mom saying that she likes your writing. She *has* to say that she likes it.
And, wow – this is the first time I’ve responded to comments before (like 4am) in a while – you have a heck of a blog going there!!!!!!!! I need to get a-reading!
Let me begin by saying “i might be TOO philosophical for my own good”
When i started college, the first hard question i asked myself was “what should i major in?” (i eventually completes an engineering degree). At that early stage, i would have said i was an atheist. Later, the question was “how will i achieve happiness” and after a great deal of searching, evolved into “if i can figure out life, i can apply what i learn toward being happy”
Little did i know how much there is regarding this… and along the way “heavenly father” (known to others as “Allah” “Buddha” “Christ” “Dharma”) revealed other lessons and truths…
For all of you that agree on this concept of luck, i would have counted myself among you not too long ago. It appears to me that a person will reach a conclusion based on the evidence in front of him or her (or it, or LGBTqwerty, etc) and at this point, the evidence in front of me points at something else…
Yeah, I’ve got some stories, too. I’ve seen to much not to believe more.
One of the things that my parents used to torture my siblings and me was to set us all down each week to watch the TV show “Hee, Haw.” It had a song that basically was “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all….” Damn if it didn’t turn out to be prophetic.
Depends on the day – Monday I was just grumpy. All day long. My “luck” reflected that.
My grandparents had Hee Haw on. Looking back on YouTube, it was really pretty funny.