Life After Full-time Work Blog

 Here’s what I’ve concluded after all those thoughts about the role of luck

In the two previous blog posts, we saw that luck (or coincidence, or fate, or the unseen hand of the person above – call it what you will: I’ll refer to it as luck) plays a large role in our lives, and that whenever luck is involved, there can be a huge variation in outcomes, a (very) few of which can be extreme.

Over the years, as I’ve thought about this (and experienced it), I’ve reached a few conclusions about what makes for a sensible way of living in this sort of world. Not many conclusions, I admit, but I do believe strongly in those few. And I’ll now outline them to you.

I’ll remind you of my definition of luck: it’s something that’s unpredictable, and you have no control over it. And its payoff is many times more than what you put into it.

I think of luck as having three phases: before, during, and after, and I’ll deal with them sequentially.

OK, I’ll start with a joke.

A man is praying to the Lord. “Dear Lord, you have given me a good life. Thank you. There’s only one more thing that I ask you for. And you know what it is. It’s the same thing I ask for every day. Please let me win the lottery. Thank you.”

The Lord replies: “And I say the same thing to you every time. First you have to buy a ticket.”

So that’s my first rule, and it applies to the “before” stage of luck. Live your life as if you’re buying an occasional lottery ticket. In other words, give luck a chance. Don’t cut off every chance, simply because the outcome isn’t certain, or may be unfavorable. I know people who have lived their lives this way: don’t do that, it may change something, and I’d rather have predictable stuff that I struggle with than the chance of something I’m unprepared for. They’ve also cut themselves off from things that could improve a situation they’re not happy with.

I’m saying: prepare yourself for luck to strike. It’s exactly the opposite of what the guy in the joke was doing. He wanted to win the lottery, but refused to buy a ticket. And of course that meant he had absolutely no chance of winning.

So the first stage is to do as much as possible to allow luck to arrive in your life. What exactly do you have to do? It’s impossible to tell, because in life you have no idea what form luck might take. Sure, we all dream of specific things happening – but our imaginations are tiny relative to what might actually happen. So I have nothing more to say than just: keep exploring, don’t confine yourself to just one path. In turn, that doesn’t mean that you have to constantly change paths. Where do you draw the line? I have no idea. My general thought is simply to try new things, but don’t totally change paths unless you truly want to leave your current path behind. That’s vague, but it’s the best I can do.

So, overall, I’m not saying you should always take a big chance. Far from it. I have two ways to qualify my “lottery ticket” analogy.

First, don’t expose yourself to the chance of a (worse) situation that you can’t live with. Most of the time a really bad outcome isn’t on the cards – or shouldn’t be, following this first qualification. If there is that chance, don’t do it. (I know it’s not always possible to foresee all possible outcomes. I’m trying to suggest general guidelines here, that’s all, not advice about any specific situation.) In other words, you need to be able to tell yourself honestly: if it doesn’t come off, I’m OK with that. The price of making the change, if the change doesn’t bring you the improvement (the luck) you hope for, is small enough that paying it doesn’t matter.

Second, that suggests to me that, as regards actually buying lottery tickets, the optimal number to buy is: one. It costs money to buy a ticket, and in most lotteries the odds are very strong that you’ll lose whatever it cost you to buy your ticket. So, in any one lottery, why spend $100 (that you’re virtually certain to lose) instead of just $10 (that you’re also virtually certain to lose)? Limit your loss, while giving yourself a chance to win.

In fact, I’ll go further. You can get partial value for your $10 expenditure on the lottery ticket, even when you lose the cash. How? By dreaming of what you’d do if you win. Don’t just tell yourself: “Oh, I’d buy a house with the first million” (or whatever). What would you do with the rest? “I have no idea!” Well, that’s my point. Think about it. You don’t have to develop an explicit plan. But think about the types of things you’d use the money for: experiences, gifts, whatever. Take your time to consider those things. Paint a picture as detailed as you can make it. That’s your reward, even if (when) you lose: you’ve developed a wonderful dream, and you’ll always have that dream. (Of course, buy the next lottery ticket too. And by spreading your expenses over multiple lotteries, your dream will continue over time.)

The second stage of luck is the “during” stage. It’s the stage where luck strikes. It’s totally random, out of your control and unpredictable, and its measure is disproportionate to your efforts. If it isn’t, it isn’t luck. It’s common to hear: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” That implies that whatever is considered luck is a direct consequence of the hard work. In that case, it isn’t luck; it’s simply the consequence of the hard work. Congratulations on whatever it was that happened to you; you earned it, good for you, well done; but don’t confuse it with luck. Luck is something that you couldn’t predict because it wasn’t within your control, and what you get is far, far larger than what you put into it – like winning the lottery. That’s my definition of luck.

As I mentioned before, luck can be bad too. But again, it happens as something outside your control. If you brought it on yourself, it’s not luck.

The third stage is the “after” stage. And that involves what you do with your luck. If it’s good luck, don’t blow it! Of course, you have to recognize that you’ve struck it lucky, and it might not be as obvious as winning the lottery. But once you get it, your job is (a) don’t blow it, and (b) if possible, use it for improvement – and the improvement could be to your own circumstances or to someone else’s, but it’s a case of putting the winnings to someone’s benefit.

I remember seeing a piece on the internet in 2004 that mentioned several specific instances of people winning millions in a lottery (in one case, twice!) and still blowing the money. The thing that tied all the instances together was that there are many people who just don’t know how to deal with money. (Or other forms of luck, of course, because life isn’t all about money.) That’s another reason for my suggestion that you paint a detailed picture of what you’d do if that form of luck came your way.

I say this in a heartfelt way, because I blew it, once, over a prolonged period of time. The details are too personal for me to disclose. I was lucky enough to be given a second chance. I learned my lesson, and didn’t blow it the second time.

Let me add a dear friend’s perspective. He’s one of three people to whom I sent the first drafts of these three blog posts on luck, for their honest comments, because I trust them enormously. He said he has these two other personal learnings:

(1) We, the readers of your blog post, may already be incredibly lucky, having to some extent won the birth lottery, having survived into our sixties, seventies or eighties, being reasonably healthy, etc. We do not focus on that nearly enough though. What I have learned, I think from our conversations over the years, is that the starting point of any conversation about luck should be to recognize just how lucky we really are. We keep wanting to win the lottery, without realizing that in many cases we have already won it.

(2) With great luck should go great responsibility.

***

Takeaway

Give luck a chance in your life, but don’t bet so much that you can’t take the loss. Dream: paint a picture of what you’d do, if luck comes your way! And if you do win, recognize the luck, and don’t blow it: be responsible with it.

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