Stumbled upon an older post of Chris Pirillo’s, describing how he had been living out the principles of “The Secret” without realizing it… offering the circumstances of his own life as evidence supportive of the “law of attraction,” he writes: “You make your own luck, good or bad.”
I disagree with this analysis. Luck is “probability taken personally.” As commonly perceived: good luck is when things go your way, bad luck is when they don’t. From that perspective, the idea that we have all made our own luck is untenable.
The only thing between us and bad luck, in the final reckoning, is preparation: the actions our minds enable us to make to contend against random circumstance. Good luck seems to accrue to the prepared. Ingenuity, creativity, knowledge, wisdom… and taking action. Many times, however, this is far from being enough. It’s hardly fair to look at the victims of chaos and sudden disaster and declare: ”you make your own luck, good or bad.”
A child with a glioblastoma tumor did not make her own luck. A widow whose police-officer husband was killed by a crazy man in an ambush did not make her own luck. The workers killed in the Twin Towers over 8 years ago did not make their own luck, nor did their kids.Update 1/14/10: The victims of the earthquake in Haiti… did not make their own luck.
Most of us do the best we can, but the majority of objective reality is out of our control. My philosophy is that our best strategy in life is to learn as much as we can, experiment, focus on what we can do and what we want to do, and take consistent actions that produce the results we want. Reading most of Chris’ work, I think he feels the same, so I’m only addressing that one sentence about luck….
Most of us face adversities and overcome them, others overcome most of them but at some point become overwhelmed (some people, a statistical anomaly, will go through life never facing any significant adversity). Things will not always go according to plan. But if they do, and we find ourselves part of that sliver of population with things always going our way, I hope we don’t ascribe that to an innate, preternatural control of destiny, making our own good luck. That’s just as irrational as saying the world is out to get us (and in psychological terms it’s a parallel manifestation of the same malady). It’s a random world and our only defenses are our minds. So then, it would be rational to say, “we can influence our luck, good or bad, with our actions and minds.”
I’ve heard “Life is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you react to it.” I know those specific quantities are poetic license, but the central idea, that life is random and our only hope is wise action, is far more rational than the idea that: ”100% of what happens to you in Life is due to your thoughts.”
Judy Dunn says:
I totally agree that “luck comes to the prepared.” But also, having done development work in 3rd world countries, babies died for lack of clean water and they and their families did not “make their own luck, good or bad.”
I think that sometimes we put on our pompous, self-centered “we make our own reality” hats and we don’t see or understand challenges of good people—in far off places where families struggle to just find food, or here, where kids live in neighborhoods where selling drugs seems to be the only way to make a living. Tell THEM about “The Secret.”
Sorry, Brain, you got me going.
20th December 2009 at 6:19 pm
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20th December 2009 at 6:23 pm
Brian Crouch says:
Totally agree, Judy.
I spent two years aboard a hospital ship. We did relief work in Sierra Leone, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal as well as Estonia before the USSR fell in October 1991. Right after I got back to the US I lived in a house with 3 Deaf guys. One of them used to watch “prosperity” preachers on TV… Benny Hinn, Robert Tilton. It enraged me to hear some of the things those guys said.
They’re much the same sort of thing as the Secret: don’t take rational action, just use the Secret, in their case “name it and claim it.” Well, no amount of thought alone is going to build a house or a company. It’s disturbing how popular that stuff can be…
20th December 2009 at 6:49 pm
Bruce Wilson says:
Have you read “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? Some wackiness in his thinking, to be sure, but the big, basic, important point that I took away was: if 1,000,000 people follow their own “method” for gaming the stock market (or methods for gaming any system) random chance dictates that a few of them will be successful…over a period of years, even. So it appears to everyone that they have tapped into a fundamental law of nature, but they have instead simply been lucky many rolls of the dice in a roll (improbable, but necessarily possible given enough people rolling dice). This is what I think of when I think of Chris’s experience (nice fellow, by the way). I expect we’ve all been lucky, then wondered “why?” and we have to speculate that there’s a purpose behind it. Having said that, I like the whole “when opportunities arise, execute!” vibe you have going in this post.
20th December 2009 at 7:13 pm
Brian Crouch says:
I have read “The Black Swan” by Taleb, which touched upon some of the same concepts. I definitely agree with you, the correlation/causation fallacy has driven more superstition and delusion than I think can be measured…
We’re all “meaning making machines,” desperate to find some meaning in every instance, good or bad.
I think the only rational approach is to realize the perils of the randomness we are in and take intelligent action to defend against chaos. It won’t always be effective but it’s better than wishful thinking.
Thanks for your comment!
20th December 2009 at 1:31 pm