Is “Luck” a Thing?

Have you ever felt lucky? Like you found a 10-dollar bill on the ground, won a giveaway, and just this morning, the banana bread you baked came out perfectly. Or perhaps you’ve had a run of bad luck... like rain on your wedding day. If you’re any human that has lived on this planet long enough, you’ve probably experienced a little bit of both. A little column A, column B.

But is it actually luck? Coincidence? An act of God or otherwise? And how do we know... I mean truly know... down to our bones?

Read onward my friends, because I am going to try to explain why I don’t actually think luck is real. Not at all. Not even a little bit.

Fortune favors the... cautious?

First, a shout out to Maria Konnikova and her incredible book, The Biggest Bluff. Konnikova got her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. A few years later, in 2016, she decided to take her learnings and study the psychology of gambling by becoming a big-time poker player. In a very short period of time, she rose to one of the top five poker players in the world.  

This competitive environment gave her the chance to closely study luck, chance, and cultivate her game theory skills.

Even professional poker players seem to rely on luck. In her book, Maria writes of her surprise as to how many top-ranked poker players refused to sit down at the poker table without a totem, be it their lucky underwear, bracelet, or in one case, a giant stuffed penguin. These are folks who should know if luck is a real thing or not, yet they choose to err on the side of cautious superstition

So, do pro poker players have some insight that we don’t? Do they know the secrets of the universe? That luck can be affected, after all? Maybe, maybe not. Let’s continue.

Luck versus hard work and success

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” 

– Thomas Jefferson

Ah, yes. This old chestnut. It’s the most typical argument we will hear as to what luck really is. While I subscribe to the old saying that luck may be a direct result of hard work, luck and hard work are not the same thing. Success from good planning and hard work does not carry the randomness that luck carries. 

In fact, they may be polar opposites. 

Those who subscribe to this version of luck seem to advocate that good luck only comes to those who plan and work. If this is the case, how does someone buy a single lottery ticket and win a fortune? 

So you think this never happens? Take my Cuban grandfather, for example. The year was 1935, and he had just arrived in Mexico. He was nearly penniless, with just enough change in his pocket for a single Mexican lottery ticket.

Fortune (luck?) smiled upon him that day, because that penniless man WON that lottery, thereby reestablishing his financial situation, and going on to become a very successful businessman both in Mexico and in the United States (where he later emigrated to). 

Obviously, his lottery win was not the result of hard work. No amount of Jeffersonian planning and grit increased my grandfather’s chances of success. He just had the good fortune of winning, that’s all. 

Nor did Malcolm Gladwell’s take on the secret of success (and thus, good fortune) have anything to do with it. Gladwell states, "Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities". It’s his form of creating your own "good luck" (i.e., success). If one has the opportunity and approaches it with the appropriate amount of diligence and practice, success is "predictable". Gladwell famously states that the appropriate number of repetitions required to get good at something is 10,000. Do something 10,000 times, and you will appear to have “good luck” with it. The problem with Gladwell’s theory as it relates to my grandfather’s lottery win is that grandpa’s Gladwellian rep count on his big win fell exactly 9,999 reps short—one ticket, one BIG win. Gladwell would have never included Grandpa’s story in his book, right? So, was it luck after all? Read on.

“Manifestation”

Just as I don’t believe in luck, I REALLY don’t believe in manifestation. Popular with those who subscribe to new age ideas, manifestation is the notion that if you can imagine a goal hard enough, it will come to fruition. It all depends on your force of will. You will things into existence simply because you want them. This is magical and wishful thinking at its most profane. Yet, belief in manifestation is deeply popular and gratifying to millions and permeates popular culture as well as new age, and evangelistic thought.

One might say that Jefferson was offering the "American Dream" version of manifestation.

And it feels very good to think manifestation is real. However, as Konnikova points out in her book, the entire process will very often run up against what is called “the planning fallacy”.

Konnikova writes, “We tend to be overly optimistic when we map our timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons. We tend to go with our best-case scenarios.” Just as success might be 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration, manifestation might be 10 percent imagination and 90 percent expectation. What's wrong with expectation? In general, nothing, except we sometimes get too married to what we hope rather than what actually comes to fruition.

Fallacies and other pitfalls

Another part of “the planning fallacy” is that evidence shows that when things don’t match your expectations, or it begins to appear that your beliefs are not valid, people tend to double down. Part of the reason why the idea of manifestation persists is the “sunk cost fallacy”; i.e., the more time you spend on something, the less willing you are to give it up.

Another pitfall is what is called the “Dunning-Kruger effect”. The less competent and knowledgeable you are on a subject, the more confident you are. The nature of manifestation is that it breeds overconfidence; a blend that when sprinkled with a dash of both planning, and sunk-cost fallacy, will make for a pretty messed up cocktail. There, we go down rabbit holes that will neither bring us the success, nor the luck we seek. 

Does this road lead us to Providence?

As with my grandfather's good fortune in the Mexican lottery, there are times when luck comes out of nowhere. I imagine it is very hard to not believe in good luck if something like that were to happen to you. But if you just can’t bring yourself to embrace such a fluffy concept as luck, perhaps you can get your arms around a meatier concept like “providence”. After all, every religion in the world talks about divine forces which can affect our individual lives in the most positive ways. I like the concept of “providence”, and being a "believer", I can accept that the hand of God sometimes moves in mysterious and powerful ways—ways that may have nothing to do with our actions, desires, and free will. Therefore, I can personally get my arms around suggesting that “Providence” and “believing” are more viable explanations for good fortune than “luck”. It’s just that Providence cannot be summoned at our command by our wishful thinking or employment of various “Lucky charms”.

In particular, I firmly reject the idea that inanimate objects can generate providence or luck. This is where I differ from the believers in both “providence” and “luck” who think they might attract luck through totems (i.e., "lucky charms"). Dependence on lucky charms seems like an act of entitlement and hubris. And we all know what happened to Icarus as he flew too close to the sun. Also, there is a certain intellectual and emotional sloppiness in giving power to lucky charms. 

“Depend on the rabbit’s foot if you will, but remember it didn’t work for the rabbit.” – R.E. Shay 

Nevertheless, I do see the power of designating objects as your totem. After all, I’ve carried the bright red beans of a mountain laurel tree, (my "magic beans"), in my pocket for years. The difference however, is that my magic beans don’t actually hold any magic and will not confer me any particular good fortune. Rather, they act as a symbol of the possibility of good fortune. Those magic beans in my pocket help me manage expectations for myself. They’re my "eye on the prize", meaning they establish cognitive fidelity with the outcomes I seek.

But what if it’s all cognitive dissonance?

Cognitive dissonance is the brain’s habit of aligning what it already believes to be true with what it observes. It is the very idea that I think hits at the core of what “luck” really is in its true form.

We believe we are lucky because we have experienced instances that we think could only be the result of luck.

It’s so much easier to explain things that way than go into a complicated analysis of various other factors. It’s not all bad, though. Cognitive dissonance helps protect us emotionally when tough situations happen—ones that are of random or sheer coincidence—by making more complex reasons as to why that situation happened (this is why we have so many conspiracy theorists nowadays, after all.)

Cognitive dissonance helps us submit our consciousness to a world where our wants and desires have zero effect on any one outcome. Think of it as a very human way of believing that we are in control. To think otherwise would be far too terrifying.

Luck, both good and bad, is further amplified when viewed as "streaks". Human intelligence works by interpreting patterns—that’s what’s given us things like math, language, and art. For example, I am on a “good” luck streak—I am on a “bad” luck streak. Somehow, we have come to believe that fate strings together in recognizable ways. We create our own patterns, even when there may not be any. We see what we wish to see and ignore what does not fit the pattern we expect.

To have and to hold “good luck”

Let’s talk about good luck first. How does one have it, get it, and then keep it? Perhaps the appearance of good luck is really just a bit of chance mixed with a positive situational outcome. Maybe there was even a bit of “providence” involved.

We can’t and don’t notice everything, but rather, we choose what we will notice—call it situational awareness. Our situational awareness is a kind of cognitive navigation, and it adapts as the brain receives more information just as a sea captain would navigate a ship based on what he sees as the ship moves through the water. Our brain's ability to notice, comprehend, and act, benefits from a built-in form of adaptive navigation. We do more of this and less of that, depending on the micro-outcomes we observe, and our minds build a kind of Excel spreadsheet capable of calculating probabilities based on the history of observations we have accumulated.

The poker player counts cards, the stock investor studies stats, the racing horse picker admires the horses, the sea captain sails his ship, all while compiling a statistical sense of probable outcomes. This is their cognitive fidelity—add on to that an inherent common sense or a deep understanding of their subject matter, which as Gladwell posits, gets better the more times one does it. We tend to follow things we like and are good at.

Call it experience, observational prowess, or plain old intuition, but folks who tend to be lucky at stuff are usually just really keen observers.

Konnikova speaks to this notion in her book by describing the tiny habits poker players watch out for when playing a round of poker which help them "read" the possible hands of other players. This includes things like how people stack their chips, how talkative they are, or even how many times they check their cards. This kind of situational and observational awareness is the bedrock of the poker player's so-called “luck”.

It is how poker players become able, agile navigators of chance. And as Edward Gibbon puts it, 

“The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.”  

To me, luck is a form of constructive opportunism. If we are “lucky”, we tend to pay attention to conditions, situations, people, and things which may provide us with positive opportunities. In short, the luckier we appear, the more observant of the object of our luck we tend to be.

For example, if we are lucky enough to meet the girl we think is cute, then we can surmise that the lucky ones will then take the opportunity to ask her out. What we call luck may very well be a form of observant opportunism coupled with decisive action.

But that's not all. As we observe conditions tending toward a lucky result, lucky ones also tend to be ready to act. Luck and a willingness to act go hand-in-hand. They are like yin and yang—one does not work well without the other.

Coincidence? I think not. Or wait, scratch that.

What about chance, or what some would call "coincidence"? The things that come out of the blue which could not possibly be predicted? That stuff happens.

While I don’t believe in luck, I believe in the reality and frequency of coincidence. Reality is way more random than we would like to believe, and coincidence is way more frequent than one might imagine. When something occurs seemingly by chance, our brains automatically default to the statement, "what are the odds?". Then we determine it to be, "a million to one", or even infinitesimal. That's when I chalk it all up to coincidence.

The universe presents such a large sampling of everything, that everything that could happen, absolutely can, and... probably will.

Think about how wonderful, and possibly terrifying, that statement is. We emerge into a world of coincidence. Coincidence is hard to fathom and dissipates our sense of personal control. So, we take comfort in concepts like luck, manifestation, faith in planning and hard work, or even good ole divine intervention.

It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that we live in a universe of uncertainty and even chaos. Yet on every level, we can bear witness to the forces of randomness, coincidence, and chance. Much like quantum mechanics, it's easier for us to make some sense of the observable. But what we call “chaos” is really just the unobservable, incomprehensible swirling of all things.

Can we even calculate the chances (of anything) in a universe which consists of an unending, and uncountable collection of forces and forms, energy, and matter, and all of those things in between which have no names, racing to and from each other, orbiting, gravitating, destroying, and even birthing? Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, our notion of chance lives and thrives in a universe where every moment is, literally, a reinvention of itself. How can we, as mere human beings, manage this chance, calculate its appearance, and then call it into existence? The only plausible answer is, we cannot. Each calculation we do, vision we summon, or goal we work to fulfill is built around assumptions from a past world that no longer exists, one that has been replaced by the next. The deck has been reshuffled. This is both the physics and the metaphysics of our universe.

There’s comfort in the chaos

I, for one, take great comfort in the fact that the universe is ever-changing. In a universe that reinvents itself every moment, you always have one more card to be dealt, or another pull at the handle, and who knows, maybe you’ll finally hit the jackpot next time. Chance works this way. To think otherwise is to deny possibility itself. And as it turns out, our brains are hardwired to live in this swirling world of chance, coincidence, and continuous change.

Until not very long ago, scientists thought that our brain patterns were fixed. Then we discovered neural plasticity. Neural plasticity, also known as neuroplasticity or brain plasticity, can be defined as the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connection. So just as the universe changes every moment, so can our nervous system and our ability to exist in our ever-changing world. It’s all the same, from the inside, out.

We are definitely not powerless in this world. As humans, we are blessed with immeasurable powers and an agile mind which allow us to determine our course, navigate our way, and safely arrive at the desired destination. Some of these powers can be defined: we observe, plan, calculate, discern, invent, reinvent, collaborate, envision, trust, define, build, deconstruct, adapt, challenge, and yes, act. With these and many other powers, we can challenge the forces of the universe, and have a fighting chance! Just as we continuously pull the handle of chance, we can also pull the oar against the current and propel ourselves. Man is the only species capable of this.

And yes, we have yet even greater powers, more mysterious, but no less potent; we imagine, love, dream, wonder, hope, forgive, tell stories, make languages, remember... and, even challenge fate.

If you break it down, none of this should be possible. Explanations do not make things any more logical. So, we reach for more simple visions of heaven such as luck, hard work, or manifestation. 

In the end, I do not fault those who embrace these constructs, because they are evidence of the most positive of human traits—the desire to reach beyond our grasp. When we are all on that heavenly road, good luck and good fortune will surely join us along the way. 

“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s heaven for?" - Robert Browning