I was trying to think of an article which talked about luck. I wanted to discuss how success doesn’t require luck, but that it’s rather formulaic. But that’s when I realized, so is a lot of the world and life. A lot of life is based on mathematics. You can use mathematics to describe the world, and a lot of life is described based on statistical probabilities. The only things that can’t be quantified relate to life satisfaction, and that will likely change soon too. So, I wanted to write a more theoretical article about how luck is all about applying math properly.
Luck is when the probabilities work in your favor
Good luck is when something apparently improbable happens, and it helps you. It took me about 26 years to distill it this way, but I think it’s important. Consider winning the lottery. That’s oftentimes considered the ultimate form of luck. Why? The odds of winning are low. This is also why we don’t usually refer to accountants and lawyers as lucky.
You never need luck
If luck is based on probabilities, then all you need to do is play the odds intelligently. If you do stuff with a high probability of success, you will put yourself in a better position than those who do things with a low probability of success.
You need perseverance
Life rewards those who put in the work. It takes a lot of grind to get much of anything in this world. Life rewards those who think long term. The longer term you think, the better you can analyze the probabilities around what your future life will look like. Keep pushing forward and keep viewing things probabilistically. Understanding perseverance in terms of probability is very important as far as I’m concerned. The more perseverant you are, the more opportunities to get lucky you’re going to create.
Your intentions and decisions must be good
You need to make decisions that are good in order to create good luck. If you roll a dice 6 times, the odds of landing on any given number once are roughly 6 in 6. If you give the dice 12 or 24 honest rolls, you’ll see that you’ll get your number of choice 2 or 4 times, roughly. Each good decision you make, along with every well intended action, is an honest roll of the dice. You don’t need luck to create luck when you’re doing all the right things.
Apply yourself in multiple fields
This is how you make yourself stand out. What are the odds of two 1 in 2 probability events happening one after the other? Probably about 1 in 4 right? By this logic, if you can create two 1 in 2 scenarios for yourself, you’re better off than 75% of people. This is an easy way for you to reduce your workload of the course of your life. Focus on being above average in multiple areas, rather than a beast in one. The really rich guy with no life or family is infinitely more miserable than the upper middle-class guy who had friends and family in his corner throughout his life. It’s a night and day difference in life outcomes.
The things we can’t control are changing
Things such as human life expectancy, for example. Over the last century, humanity has made incredible strides when it comes to fixing defects and curing disease. There are some things which you can’t control, such as becoming terminally ill at a young age. But you don’t need good luck to avoid that. You just need to be a normal person. Bad luck can strike, but we have no control over that. It’s best to focus on what we can control.
Luck is math. Once you understand some basic math and apply it to life, you don’t worry too much. All you can do is work your butt off in order to maximize the amount of luck you have in life. And also work smart. Understand the math necessary to improve your probabilities of success, and apply it to your life. You won’t regret it, once you’ve figured it out.
Thanks for paying attention.
