Luck Doesn't Exist

http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=95

by lionhearted • 16 years ago

3 4 16 years ago

joshfraser• 16 years ago

i agree that you definitely have to work hard to put yourself in a position to "get lucky" but there is an element of chance to life that you simply can't ignore. a lot of times i attribute good things that happen to me as "luck" because there's a dozen people i could point to who would deserve it more than myself. attributing my good fortune to luck gives me an explanation for why i got something when other people were smarter, faster & harder working than myself.

kmak• 16 years ago

I think the term "luck" is too overloaded. Tons of people do actually use the term "luck" as a clutch, as in it's bad luck that a pot of gold did not fall onto their lap. In that sense, I agree with the article. However, it probably swings too far in the other direction.

For me, it's understanding the probabilities, persist, and "luck" is everything that is out of your control. Even something as "simple" or at least fundamentally human as finding someone you happen to love is subjected to these outside forces that I call "luck", but who's to judge?

Dismissing this concept of "luck" makes it too hard for empathy -- it's almost saying that people are poor because they don't work hard.

I'm a relatively lucky guy myself, and I'm constantly surrounded by people who are smarter and harder working, but sometimes things just don't swing their way, just a little bit. Maybe I'm selling myself short, and while I put in my share of hard work, I can't honestly say I attribute everything to luck. I took advantage of my luck, but it's too easy to attribute everything to skill.

It might be easier to motivate yourself to work hard with the assumption that luck doesn't exist, and to persist, and to give all you got, but I feel you don't need to discard the concept to do it.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

I was talking to my Mom about this - she'd been out of her old industry for 10 years, and was moving back to the East Coast from the Mountain states and got a pretty good job. She said she was really lucky.

I said, Mom, you weren't lucky, it was a longshot to get that job, but you hustle, and you're good to people, and you'd have kept going until you got something. And I listed all the friends she'd met and people she'd helped back East, and how eventually she'd get hired to work with one of them.

Any individual job opportunity had a low chance of working - but, in total, it was fairly inevitable. But that's the funny thing - no matter what job she got, it was going to feel "lucky" because it was a longshot. But getting a good job wasn't a longshot, my Mom is incredibly hard working and good to people, she'd have gotten something almost no matter what.

rskar• 16 years ago

His blog post acknowledges probability. Probability is the measure of likelihood, i.e. the chance of something happening. Luck is defined as a chance occurrence.

If luck doesn't exist, there are no chance occurrences. If there are no chance occurrances, then probability is meaningless. If probability is meaningless, his blog post is ... crap?

Luck Doesn't Exist

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