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.”
