We’re extremely lucky people… great kids, health, lots of adventure, and lately we’ve spent a lot of time around the fire at night talking about luck. It’s one of those strange concepts that we’re all familiar with and… don’t understand. I bet that If you ask around you won’t get the same definition twice and still the concept and it’s symbols are found everywhere. One thing we all did agree on… a rabbits foot couldn’t be good luck on account of how it worked out for the rabbit… and it had four of em.
Another funny thing about luck is that the average person is far more likely to admit to bad luck than good. You know what I mean… when something good happens… that of course was skill meeting opportunity. But when it goes against them… oh man… what bad luck! Like everything it’s pretty much a matter of how narrow your focus is. Just being born in a country as wealthy as the US is an incredible stroke of good luck and… we completely overlook it.
Acknowledging luck makes life seem random and plays havoc with our need for control. I often think about what happened to Malia…if I had not heard her fall… or if I had gotten there just one minute later. And when Carson got hit by a car on Maui… what if it had struck him just a little differently? There’s no doubt that luck has played a tremendous role in our lives and the more I think about it the more I’m forced to admit that somehow without any obvious skill or planning or anything resembling a reason… it all just worked out. Meanwhile there are those who didn’t hear their partner fall, or who were struck by a car just a little differently. And when you can admit that… you begin to realize that there are many intelligent hard working people in this world who… somehow just didn’t get the lucky break. They aren’t less skilled, or less intelligent, or less brave… it simply didn’t work out for them, and they’re just as confused as to why it didn’t as we should be about why it did.
This of course flies in the face of our belief that “winners” know more than “losers”. The physicist Niels Bohr was credited with the line that “An expert is simply someone who’s made every possible mistake in a narrow field.” With that thought in mind think of all the business and life coaching that’s conducted by those who haven’t made every possible mistake and don’t even know it… or won’t admit it. And since you can’t coach luck I’m thinking that it’d be much more instructional to attend several seminars given by people who have failed in as many different ways than to listen to those who’ve been incredibly lucky and aren’t reflective enough to even recognize it?
In Berkeley Ca, Paul Piff has been studying how we handle good luck. It’s not so pretty. In one study he randomly selected one hundred fifty students and paired them into groups of three. He put each group into a room, randomly selected one of the subjects to be the leader of the group, and gave them a problem to solve. After just a few minutes a researcher came back into the room with a plate of cookies… four cookies… for only three subjects. And although the group leader was appointed… NOT SELECTED by the other subjects… they took the fourth cookie without asking with incredible regularity.
Another study study conducted by Dr Piff paired subjects for a rigged game of Monopoly. Subjects were randomly paired to play and every game began with a coin toss. The winner of the toss got the usual $200 upon passing GO, and both die, and they got to use the car token. The loser…$100 for each pass, one die, and the shoe. In other words, one player had twice the money and mobility of the other…and a more stylish way of enjoying that mobility. It’s not hard to figure who won the games…but the REALLY interesting part is that when the winners were interviewed afterwards…only a very small percentage of the them attributed their victory to the coin toss. The rest claimed to have outplayed their opponent. At least that explains those speeches about “bootstrapping” that we keep getting from billionaire heirs.
I think that we all have that larger than life persona inside of us who arrogantly claims that they are the maker of their own fortune and who would happily eat the fourth cookie… smacking our lips as those who didn’t “have the guts to grab the ring… uh cookie watch. But as we gain in experience… after the world smacks us around a bit, our “smaller self”… that feeling you get when you stare into the universe and try to comprehend it’s size… gets a bigger voice. The Hindu have a metaphor called Indra’s net. It’s a net that stretches infinitely in all directions. In each vertex is a multi faceted ruby suspended in such a way that when you look at one you see the reflection of EVERY other ruby in it. The small self feels this… how deeply all of our lives are inter-connected… and recognizes that there are so many moving parts… and so many things that have to go “right” in that chain of moving parts for any favorable outcome to occur… that… when it does occur it’s FAR closer to serendipity than it is to skill meeting opportunity.