Three Laws of Luck

Anybody out there believe in luck?  I do.  It’s the only explanation for some things I’ve come across.   

What about the notion that, like fate, it predetermines things?  It’s written in the stars perhaps?  Do you believe that?  

Or do you believe that luck is just the best explanation for things that already happened? 

I believe in luck in my own way.  I’ve learned some things about luck and I’m here to tell you about them, which does not necessarily, however, make this your lucky day.

It was baseball that first taught me about the complexities of luck.  Luck showed its face in our lowly games.  From the lucky hits I would scratch out when I played with my older brothers and actually managed to get on base, to the lucky catches others made with their eyes closed, just sticking the glove up to protect themselves.  Later I learned about luck in the big leagues.  I learned from the movie about Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at Yankee Stadium, and his famous line—the one everybody remembers-- “Sure I’ve had a bad break.  Yet, today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” I didn’t know much about ALS then, but I knew he had died less than 2 years later.  This week, I looked up the full text of his speech and remembered why his farewell made me think about luck in a new way back then. His whole message was about how he had come to know so many good people in his life.  To this man, luck was not hitting or winning or developing a terminal illness, luck was the phenomenal people he came to know.   So here’s the 1st Law of Luck--Luck is about the people in your life.

To most people, luck means many other things.

Luck is a term people apply to events that happen by chance and not by design. Looking back at a thing and being unable to point to the exact reasons that it came out as it did and attributing it to luck is a commonly accepted use of the term.  In that sense, I count myself a lucky man, just as Lou Gehrig did.  Some amazingly good things have happened to me, and, like Lou Gehrig, I have been privileged to know and have people in my life who have been a great gift.  It was nothing I earned or deserved; fortune just smiled on me and put them in my life.   

But you can’t just leave your life to chance and wait for good things to happen, can you?

I found a Japanese proverb I like—“To wait for luck is like waiting for death.”  Think about that one for a bit.  After pondering that one for a while, I decided what it meant to me.  The only thing that prepares you for death is living.  What prepares you for luck is doing.  “He who does not venture has no luck.”  

Ask yourself, was Charles “Lucky” Lindbergh lucky to complete his transatlantic crossing at the age of 25?  I’d say he was lucky—In the years between the age of 20 when he began to fly and age 25, when he flew to Paris, he had crashed at least five times.  Three times he had to bail out to save himself.  But his transatlantic flight would never have happened if he had not been flying for years, developing, in his words, “his focus and goal orientation, and growing into a resourceful and skilled aviator.”  When luck found Charles Lindbergh, he was prepared.

So, the Second Law of Luck, your luck will be better if you have worked and prepared instead of just waited for it. 

There are religious traditions like Catholicism and Buddhism that hold the unexplained phenomena are attributable, not to luck, but to providence, or karma.  I don’t know.

My view is luck happens.  There are things that happen, regardless of merit or belief, that are not explainable otherwise.  The best term for that is luck.  A renowned physicist was asked if he really believed that his hanging a horseshoe above the door of his house would bring him good luck.  His response—“Of course not, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not.”  Ah, but if luck is going to come our way whether we believe it or not, why not depend on it, leaving it all to chance? 

Depending on luck to carry you all the time simply because it has carried you this far is a mistake.  I tend to agree with the man who said, “Luck always seems to be against the man who depends on it.”  Look at the real estate market, and all those speculators and those sub-prime loans.  For umpteen years median prices for homes went straight up. Homeowners are lucky, huh?  Tell that to the 16 million people who had borrowed more than they could afford to repay, and wound up in foreclosure over the past five years.  Simply put, the Third Law of Luck is--luck happens, but it is not reliable.

Nothing is permanent.  Especially luck, which leads me to one final proverb “Luck is never given, it is always loaned.”