It is a universal desire to be lucky! Don’t you want to know how to be lucky? All of us would like and hope to be favored by the Gods of luck. This is not a modern concept. Rather, it was just as strong a desire for ancient men as it is today.
There are very strong and opposing view regarding the concept of luck. A section of the world believes it is extremely important to have luck by your side along with talent, opportunity, and hard work. While the other section feels like luck is a crutch used by the ones who are unskillful or lazy. Until a few months ago, I belonged to the latter section of people.
In this blog post, I will try to contextualize luck the way I see it and understand it’s importance. I will also cover 5 unbelievable things to do right now to become lucky.
What is Luck and its importance in Life?
People who have achieved success in any area of their life tend to take offence in attributing their success to something like luck. They generally attribute their success to hard work, skill, vision, or a combination of these. This is an outcome of something called the Egocentric Bias.
For example: The per capita GDP of India is about US$ 1,900 and about US$ 6,461 adjusted for PPP. Contrasting to this, the per capita GDP PPP adjusted for the US is about US$ 69,000. This clearly demonstrates that the country you were born in plays an important role in shaping your future and quality of life. Also, the place you were born is not something you can really control. It is an external factor something we could call as ‘luck’.
Another piece of evidence was found when a study found that NFL players were disproportionately born in early months of the year compared to the general population. Further investigation into this revealed that the kids born in the period of January through March had a ‘developmental advantage’ compared to the other kids born in the same year. Here you can clearly pin-point how their time of birth in the year influenced their odds of being successful. This is certainly another instance where all the factors leading to success were not controlled by the individuals themselves.
Having said this, I would like to clarify my stand here. I am NOT discounting the importance of hard work, skills, or vision. In fact, I see luck as a complimentary factor that tips the odds of success slightly in your favor given the prerequisites (hard-work, skills, talent, or vision). Without the prerequisites, luck is useless.
By now must be already wondering, how can I be lucky? What should I do. You’ve got yourself covered :). Below are the 5 things you can do right away:
1. Be Action Oriented – Focus on creation rather than only consumption
All the progress human race has made so far is 100% due to creation and none of it can be attributed purely consumption. Every creation presents an opportunity to be the next important innovation or improvement. Every successful individual would have created something very valuable and important in their life. The more you create, the more you create opportunities for it to click and for yourself to be lucky!
2. Grab Opportunities
Be ready to grab any and every opportunity that comes your way. All of us would have stories of missed opportunity. It can be in terms of investing in some stock we identified but ended up not investing, or a job opportunity that we should have grabbed or a business opportunity.
When you grab more opportunities, your odds of it being a success increases.
3. Stop Procrastination
When you procrastinate, you not only become lazy, but you blow up any opportunity that comes your way. And we already know, grabbing opportunities is an important factor to increase your odds of success and being lucky. Procrastination also results in wasting a lot of precious time leading to failed projects and not achieving your goals in life.
This leads to a vicious cycle of feeling low on confidence and self-esteem. This in-turn results in holding ourselves back again leading to in-action. In such situation, you also end-up making poor decision. All of these greatly decreases your chance of being lucky.
4. Follow your instincts – Listen to your gut
We tend to over-analyze or over-think a situation when you should rather follow your instincts. We inherently know what works best for us but end up ignoring our gut-feeling. This leads to poor-decision and regret in a lot of cases.
For example, we know playing at a slot machine is risky. But we still end up rationalizing playing at one with reasons like, it is just for fun, or it is a onetime thing. You should have followed your gut.
Choose high probability bets in life. Investing in an index fund has an average return of 10% while playing at a slot machine has a -5% average return. Why would you choose to play at a slot machine instead of investing in an index fund? But we still end up doing the opposite, thanks to over-analyzing, while the decision was easy and comes instinctively.
5. Focus on learning new skills
Learning a new skill is not only great for self-development and personal growth. It also places you well to be able to grab variety of opportunities. This can greatly increase your chance to be lucky.
Learning a new skill also gives you an ability to create more in varied directions. Again, it works in your favor to be lucky.
Hopefully, you can start working towards being lucky right away. It is not important to wait until you can work on all five points listed above. Starting with only 1 or 2 will bring a significant change to your chances of success or being lucky.
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