This blog is inspired by Professor Barbara Piette. In the last class of her ES720 Management Communications, she asked the class with a slide: “Are You Lucky” and I just realized this topic was never taught or even talked about in schools before. My curiosity pushed me to dig a little more into this topic and found the role of luck in life is far greater than we think of. I hope this blog could help anyone who rarely look into luck just like I was.
What Is Luck?
Definition of luck: Good events happened to people, which were not much caused by their own actions.
What Is Being Lucky?
Being lucky is an impression of people on events that happened to someone can be concluded as luck. Although “lucky” is concluded by past events, people use it all the time with a bias to project into future luck.
Since “lucky” is a subjective term like “beautiful”, someone’s view of being unlucky can be viewed as lucky in others’, and vice versa. However, just like beauty, luck also has commonly held standards by the majority public in our society despite each person’s different opinions. So, we are going to discuss “lucky” in a macro view (under common-sense agreed lucky standards) and in a micro view (under personal feelings of lucky) in this blog.
A Macro Perspective of Luck
Luck plays a really important role in success when we take a macro view considering the commonly held standards in the world. No matter in which society, luck determines most of the life, by when and where you were born in, what kind of family you have, which college you go to, etc. I will not try to prove this opinion in this blog anymore since Howard Marks has discussed this point very well in his memo: Getting Lucky. Nassim Taleb and Michael Mauboussin also have written very interesting related theories in their books that worth reading. In this blog, I am here to introduce everyone to my model: Impression Matrix.
Impression Matrix
The Impression Matrix divides people’s impressions on success or failure into four quadrants with two variables. Each of the four quadrants represents a specific combination of people’s emotion towards the event and the controllability of the event:
1. Low control, Happy Event. The protagonist is viewed as lucky.
2. Low control, Sad Event. The protagonist is viewed as unlucky.
3. High control, Happy Event. The protagonist is viewed as diligent.
4. High control, Sad Event. The protagonist is viewed as lazy.
Fun Facts of People in Each Quadrant Behave
- People in the lucky quadrant often want to pretend to be in the diligent quadrant. Lucky quadrant people always want to accredit their success mostly to their diligence, especially when telling their success stories to others. One reason is due to the survival bias and another due to linear prediction bias. A lot of successful ones never talk about how lucky they were which creates a misleading stereotype to the public of success equals hard work now. Also, elite college admission is actually in the lucky quadrant while the admission centre always pretends this to be in the diligent quadrant.
- People in the diligent quadrant often want to appear humble and avoid competition, so they pretend to be lucky sometimes. Too much competition drives the controllability down. For example, getting a good job with a good college degree was in the diligent quadrant in the old days. However, with the inflation of college degrees now, it has moved to the lucky quadrant.
- The lazy quadrant people pretend to be in the unlucky quadrant all the time by finding excuses and avoiding responsibilities. These people are the ones who blame others all the time, including luck, of course.
- Although the culture in the society now portraits people in the diligent quadrant, most successful people are in the lucky quadrant. I guess it is because the unfair concept of “better to be lucky than diligent” bothers people a lot.
Do You Seem Lucky?
This is a way to estimate if you seem lucky under commonly held standards of luck. You can plot each life event as one circle in Impression Matrix, with the circle’s size proportional to the event’s effect. It’s a good idea to start with major life events as bigger circles and finish up with minor events as smaller circles. Then, you should have a general grasp of where most areas of circles are distributed in the Impression Matrix. Now, you have a macro sense of if you are lucky.
How to Get More Luck?
- Take more risks in life to have more randomness. However, be prepared to hedge more unlucky events as well. For example, investing in just a few stocks instead of the index will result in a higher return upper bound.
- Create more butterfly-effect events by doing more seemingly unrelated good deeds. This is often referred to as Karma in many religions. For example, helping random strangers could lead to unexpected valuable social connections. Many people even find jobs/true loves by talking to someone they never meet on public transportations/social media.
- Believe in yourself that hard work will finally result in success. It’s kind of paradoxical to believe in hard work while you know you are really waiting for luck. This at least motivates people to persevere and hold on long enough to get lucky one day. Countless startup stories have someone never gives up and succeeded in the end.
A Micro Perspective of Luck
Richard Wiseman has found that luck is completely a matter of how we choose to look at our lives. In the end, we are the ones who decide if we are feeling lucky despite common standards.
Do You Feel Lucky?
Unlike uniformed standards, personal feelings of ‘lucky’ depend on your subjective view on life events. You can always trick the brain to feel luckier if you think of more events as happy or less controlled. Do you still remember the Impression Matrix?
Quick Ways to Feel Luckier
- Savoring helps to remind you of the past lucky events and makes you feel luckier now. For example, think about the happy wedding or the best birthday party you had.
- Try to think about something in your life which unlucky people having a hard time getting. Most people take a lot of things for granted and don’t feel lucky with the stable society we now live in. For example, few people open water taps and shout out: “I am so lucky to have clean tap water!” However, we can make people feel luckier for themselves by playing a video of people who lack water severely before they open the taps in their bathrooms easily.
- Imagine today is your last day. People often feel luckier about life after experiencing a major disease. You don’t have to get cancer, but even imagine it helps to feel luckier about the current life.
Hope you understand luck a little bit better than 5 minutes ago by reading through this post. If you find this story helpful, don’t forget to hit the clap button or comment your thoughts down below!
