Luck

By Marcus Gibson

For every person who believes that luck exists, there are many others who say they are skeptical or that only bad luck rules. The irony is that many who say they don't believe in good fortune or having a lucky break often end up unable to explain the repeated unusual combinations of everyday events. Inevitably, everyone has gone through stages of luck or misfortune in the most varied aspects of life.

There is an anonymous phrase -attributed to athletes, gurus, thinkers, and authors of self-help books- that says: "The more you train, the luckier you get". It may seem like a mere cliché, but this is basically the way science finds to explain that, in the face of random events in life, there is a force very similar to luck. And that it is possible to become, in practice, a more "lucky" person. Linked to luck are fortune and destiny, topics that are analyzed in this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ediciones Afrodita
• Release date: Apr 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215182925

Book preview

Luck

What is it and how to attract it

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Marcus Gibson

Ediciones Afrodita

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Temary:

Chap.1 What is luck?

Chap.2 Training Luck

Chap.3 The Success

Chap.4 Destiny

Chapter 1

What is luck?

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Luck can be defined as success or failure apparently caused by chance and not by one's own actions. Therefore, luck is the accidental way things happen without planning them. When luck leads to success, we call it good luck, and when it brings failure, we call it bad luck.

Examples of good luck:

• Find an item of value

• Avoid an accident at the last minute

• Guessing the correct answer without any knowledge

• win a lottery

Examples of bad luck:

• Win the lottery, but lose the ticket

• Due to lack of time, you decide to leave two chapters out of fifty without studying for the exam, and those are precisely the ones that evaluate you.

• a freak accident

We also associate some specific items and events with good and bad luck. Examples are horseshoes, four-leaf clover, jade, dream catcher, bamboo, white elephant, etc. They are considered lucky symbols in some cultures. Pouring salt, breaking a mirror, a black man crossing your path, opening an umbrella inside, certain numbers like 13, etc., are considered signs and symbols of bad luck according to superstition.

When we talk about luck we mean positive outcomes due to coincidences, especially unexpected or underserved ones. As obvious as it sounds, the opposite of luck is bad luck.

Luck is not only linked to positive outcomes, like winning the lottery. People often experience being lucky in situations where they came close to things going wrong for them. The closer one has come to an accident, and the more serious it could have been, the luckier one feels to have escaped.

There are many superstitions associated with luck, including that you have a certain 'quota' of luck, about who is born lucky, and how you can influence luck in games. Such notions are rooted in wishful thinking and the human tendency to see patterns in chance.

Luck fascinates and confuses.

Luck and bad luck, luck, and misfortune, happy and unhappy coincidences - we experience them daily, read about them in the newspaper, talk about them, hear about them, and want to hear more. Because there is a fascination in something that happens without effort and calculation on the part of the actor, but still gives results. Sometimes we are given what we dream of, and other times we effortlessly manage to avoid what we fear the most.

So it turns out that luck is used and understood in two almost completely opposite meanings, namely: 1) about events controlled by pure coincidences and 2) about events controlled or guided beyond coincidences. The first interpretation can be called rational and scientific, the second - magical or superstitious:

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Luck 1 - luck as coincidences

If we look at luck in a database of psychological articles, we will find most references to attribution research. Especially in Bernhard Weiner et al.'s ranking of performance explanations, luck has an established place. When people succeed or fail in a task, says this model, we will tend to give them the credit/responsibility (internal attribution), or seek an explanation in circumstances external to the person (external attribution). Both internal and external attribution can include stable and variable causes. With stable internal factors, one often thinks of the capabilities and abilities of the person, while effort and mood belong to the unstable group. A similar distinction can be made between stable external causes, such as the difficulty of the task. Luck is thus in this model the epitome of causes that the person himself cannot control (external), nor predict with great success (unstable). It may be worth noting that Weiner did not arrive at this label by asking people what they meant by luck, he just stuck it in the group of external and unstable causes because he needed a name for this category and thought luck fitted the bill.

A sudden descent of a vehicle that ends up on the edge of the cliff in all probability could have gone wrong. In such cases, we compare what happened with what did not happen, the real with the counter-actual

But perhaps, based on this attitude, we can overlook the extent to which luck and bad luck really plague us and reign (Mlodinow, 2008). Bandura (1982) argues that random coincidences play a crucial role in determining