“Good luck” is a phrase that is probably said millions of times in dozens of different languages each day. By saying this, we mean that we hope that the recipient will have only good things happen to them.
Some of us do things that we think will influence the luck we have, either to improve the good or minimise the bad. We touch wood, do not walk under ladders, break dishes on New Years (really?), do not open an umbrella indoors, carry talismans when we go gambling. Some of these are done habitually, without thought. If we break a mirror, it will bring bad luck. “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long have good luck”. On Friday the thirteenth, don’t let a black cat cross your path. The list goes on and on.
Casino managers have been known to spread salt under a table game when the players are winning a great deal. I am not sure what the connection between the salt and the game is, but they seemed to think it was effective.
I once worked for a casino owner who would not have red and white flowers displayed at the same time anywhere in his casino. This, he said, would bring his casino “bad luck”.
Temperature is associated with luck in gambling. Gamblers think they are on a “hot streak” when they have a run of winning hands, spins, or throws; the table is “hot”. They will leave when the table (or the dealer) goes “cold”.
In the film The Cooler, a character played by William H. Macy is employed by a casino as a “cooler”. His job is to hover around gaming tables where customers are winning big, because his presence is believed to “cool” the tables and stop the customers from winning. Spoiler alert: Once he finds love, his “skill” diminishes.
All of these are examples of superstition. Superstition is the human way of trying to make sense of a random world and doing certain things to influence the future, to bring good luck, to ward off the bad, and make sure only good things happen.
But what is luck? Luck is no more than some random or unpredictable event that we have no control over. It either works out well for you, in which case it is “good luck”, or if it turns our badly, it is “bad luck”. Chip Denman, a former statistician at the National Institute for Health, described luck as “… probability taken personally”.
In life, we tend understate the influence of luck (random chance events) in our successes and overstate it in our failures. If the outcome is advantageous, we think it was skill; if detrimental, it was down to bad luck.
Politicians are very happy to claim that their policies have worked, but will blame external factors when they haven’t. Similarly, economists take credit when their predictions for the performance of the economy prove correct, but are happy to blame some other factors when they don’t.
Luck is classified by philosophers as three types:
- Circumstantial luck, or luck that involves the circumstances we find ourselves in. You are in the right place at the right time or the converse. Many business successes can be put down to being in the right place at the right time.
- Outcome luck or something happens and with hindsight, the outcome can be determined as either good or bad luck. There is a hurricane and many properties are destroyed, but yours survives.
- Constitutive luck or luck that includes pre-occurring elements that cannot be changed. You get drafted into the army and go fight in a war, while if you were younger, you would not have been drafted.
Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, has studied luck and specifically people who think they are lucky and those who think they are unlucky. What at first seems surprising is that he found distinct differences in life’s outcomes between these two groups.
Both groups had no real insight into why they were or were not lucky, but Wiseman’s research showed that their thoughts and behaviour shaped their fortune.
He found that lucky and unlucky people were both presented with chance opportunities, but only the lucky group recognised them as potential prospects and took action to capitalise on them. The unlucky people did not notice them.
It is true that capitalising on these breaks may take skill to bring out their full potential, but without the break in the first place, they will come to nothing.
Wiseman proposes four principles for “generating” good fortune: creating and noticing chance opportunities; listening to intuition; creating self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations; and adopting a resilient attitude.
He performed personality tests on both groups. The unlucky group tended to be more anxious. Other research has shown that anxiety reduces people’s ability to notice the unexpected. If you are anxious and not expecting a chance opportunity, which by definition you will not be expecting, you will not notice it.
Lucky people tend to be open and flexible, more relaxed, and will see what is there instead of just what they are looking for.
I do a great deal of work in project development, especially early stage (pre-development). Where very large gambling projects are concerned, successes are rare. I liken pre-development to walking in a fog. You know where you are headed and the route you need to follow, but as you proceed, you start to see that there are things in your path that you need to deal with or go around. As long as you keep the target in mind and try to find your way through, you will increase your chances of getting there. Tenacity is important in life; if you get put off at the first upset or when a challenge presents itself, you will never find success.
During the last summer Olympic Games, I read an article that said that silver medallists tended to be less happy than bronze medallists, a counterintuitive thought. But it turns out that those who won the silver medal thought that if only they had done a little better, they could have won gold. Whereas the bronze medallists thought that had they done a little bit worse they would not have won a medal at all and so were happier with their performance.
Wiseman suggests that lucky people look at life as the bronze-medal winners do and unlucky people are more like the silver-medal winners. If bad things happen, the unlucky people bemoan their bad luck, but the bronze medallists think, “Well, it could have been worse”.
So if you want to be a “lucky” person, be open to ideas, flexible in your way of thinking, tenacious in your approach, and optimistic about life. It’s not a guarantee, but at least you are not closing off opportunities for success before they have been fully explored.
