Plans, practice, and preparation are all useful, even essential, if you want to accomplish anything significant in life. But no matter how rock-solid they are, your plans, practice, and preparation cannot immunize you against random occurrences, aka luck. Your luck in a given circumstance may be good or bad, but by its nature it isn’t predictable.
A good definition of luck is:
The chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.
It’s important to recognize that, statistically speaking, random events occur far more often and have a far greater impact on us than we recognize. Events outside our control will occur. When everything goes according to plan or falls into place, we can thank our lucky stars. But we can’t count on being lucky. And we can’t take credit for luck.
The fact that luck is something we can’t control automatically casts it in a bad light. Both the nature of it and the outcome are uncertain and uncertainty gives the unconscious part of our brain the heebie jeebies. We prefer to operate under the illusion of control, maintaining our belief that we can influence outcomes even in the face of significant irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
Thus there are people who believe they create their own luck. “Chance favors the prepared mind,” said Louis Pasteur. And in some circumstances that’s true. You can’t necessarily take advantage of advantageous circumstances if you don’t know how to respond or are not prepared to do so. You can, to an extent, be ready to open your arms to random good fortune—which would certainly be more welcome than bad fortune.
Estimating Impact
However, good fortune does not always lead to good outcomes. Take lottery winners, a group that has been the subject of numerous studies. Not everyone who wins the lottery ends up worse off than they were before—but a surprising number of winners do. And most report being no happier after winning than people who didn’t win.
Our beliefs about outcomes are strongly affected by one of the cognitive biases we’re afflicted with. This one is known as the impact bias, and it has two parts. We think we know whether a future potential event will affect us in a positive or in a negative way. And we’re usually pretty good at getting that prediction right. We also think we know how large or small that impact will be and how long it will last. That’s where we often miss the mark by anticipating that both good and bad events will affect us more—and for longer—than they actually will.
Something that is pretty predictable is that you’re more likely to overreact to bad luck when you aren’t fully committed to your current plan of action. If you’re more or less going through the motions, it won’t take much to blow you off course or permanently derail you. You might think what you’re up to is just not meant to be or that you don’t have what it takes.
That’s why it’s critical to get very, very clear about your desired outcome ahead of time. If you have a strong commitment to what you’re going after, you’re more likely to consider bad luck a bump in the road. Maybe it’s a small bump or maybe it’s an enormous boulder. Nevertheless, you’ll be more inclined to figure out how to navigate around it and continue on your way if you really want what’s on the other side and if you know the next steps you need to take.
Enter the Black Swan
Sometimes luck, good or bad, has a relatively minor effect. On the other hand, luck—in the form of what Nassim Taleb calls Black Swans—can be life-changing. Taleb describes a so-called Black Swan this way:
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
The majority of swans are white, so black swans are unexpected. As Taleb says, on September 10, 2011, the events of September 11 were not reasonably conceivable. If they had been, something could have been done to prevent them.
A Black Swan event can permanently alter your course or at the very least make it vastly more difficult to pursue. But you can’t anticipate such events or know whether they will be positive or negative. What you can be certain about is what is meaningful to you. If the course you’re on is massively disrupted, you will still have the knowledge of what’s important to you, even if you have to find a completely different way to create it in your life.
If there’s something you want to do and the main thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?
You can’t predict the future no matter how much your brain wants you to believe you can. Although you can—and should—plan ahead, it’s important to remember that the path from here to there is rarely a straight line. Randomness and luck often play a larger role in both process and outcome than we’d like to acknowledge.
In the long run, how you respond (persevere) in the face of setbacks and random events is more important than achieving instant or quick success. And you can take all the credit for persevering.
Part of the series A-Z: An Alphabet of Change.
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