How many times have you pressed that button in you life?
I don't know about you but I've done it actually multiple times. Definitely more than I can remember.
We all like to be lucky. As a matter of fact, I want to be lucky so that I win all the time. So, let's try to hack this thing down, have luck play on our side, literally ALL THE TIME.
Ok, I know that your busy.
And I feel you'd prefer to be given a concrete way of having luck on you side without doing the whole analysis and hacking with me.
So I've done the work for you.
Unfortunately, the result is not so great.
I want to be be very upfront. Your chance of winning because of luck is..
ZERO.
I don't mean to be hard on you but, forget about luck, it's not happening.
Let me illustrate how I came to this disappointing result.
First up, what does it mean to be lucky?
Yes, clearly in life, there is a chance of someone hitting a jackpot. However, we can admit that this probability of luck played in a single event like lottery is critically slim, almost none. I think it's fair to say, it's at least not happening in my lifetime.
Let's take it a bit further. Then what does it mean to be lucky in an area of your interest whether it's you career, money, love or etc.?
We never say a person is lucky if one reaches a goal once, and forever fails to achieve it for the rest of his or her life. In other words, we never attach a word "luck" if it happens only once because the impact is so minuscule. We don't only live one year and die. If a basketball player used to be the best in high school, we don't regard his career as a lucky athlete. Because it's never an one time event. It's series of constant wins that need to be stacked then, people might notice it and start to consider if he or she is lucky. In most cases, most of things in life take the form of competition whether it's explicitly realized or not.
If you think about it, bringing the luck factor into the competition is almost like a nonsense. To illustrate this clearly, let's think about one of the most common form of competition, a tournament. In order to become the last standing winner, the champion, you need to win not only once but multiple times. With simple math, probability of winning many times in a row due to luck is far lower than probability of winning once by being lucky. For instance, say, your probability of winning in a chess match by sheer luck is 10%. For simplicity, let's use somewhat unrealistic example where there are only 8 people competing in a certain area of interest (yes, usually it's more than thousands); a chess tournament of round of 8 with no preliminary games. This case you only need to win three times in a row to become the final winner. Then, if you were to become the champion by sheer luck, you best bet is 0.001, probability wise. To me, that looks almost ZERO. Plus, in reality, there are far more than 8 competitors in your area of interest, so anyone's chance of winning by sheer luck is indeed none.
I know, it's a bummer.
But some of you might say, "I already know this, why the f*ck do you even bother to explain?"
I believe that accepting as an unalterable truth that success of yours or others never can and will ever come from sheer luck is the very first realization to be fully instilled in you to unlock your potential.
Relying on luck even by small margin, can really hinder your success and improvement. Often times, a person discounts his or her competitors performance by attributing to luck. This pushes the person away from the truth why he or she lost. In the end, there's no improvement but only left with self-delusion.
This post is going to be in conjunction with later posts that evolve around the tangible benefit of competition and taking loss. I'll try my very best to closely tie everything so you get a clear picture in the end.
For now, one take away that I have for your is, "there is no such thing as luck".
Unlike your initial hope of finding how to have luck playing on your side, this post might have left you with disappointment. But note that as luck's contribution in your victory converges to zero, your chance of winning because of your ambition, talent, and effort become 100%.