Finally! It’s been a few days a week since I finally bought karlastarr.net, in anticipation for my new project. This is very blatantly inspired by various things I was reading last week, more or less simultaneously: Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, and John Mayer’s Twitter page. I pray that this is the only time in history those things have been combined in any fashion. (In the past few weeks, I’ve also: listened to everything of David Sedaris’s, including The SantaLand Diaries, finished Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers, and been thinking about life in general. I’m deep like that rethinking everything I know because of an impending birthday.)
Here’s the gist of what I want to know:
- How much of luck is truly random?
- Are some people are consistently luckier than others? Can’t we learn from them?
- How can we use or manipulate the laws of probability and randomness in our everyday lives?
- Can I increase my own luck? How?
There’s not as much written on luck as there is on, say, happiness, largely because of the very definition itself:
“the force that causes things, especially good things, to happen to you by chance and not as a result of your own efforts or abilities” (Cambridge International Dictionary of English)
I usually define it as probability interpreted personally, an unexpected or unforeseen beneficial occurrence; the kind of thing you can’t plan, which seems outside of your control. (Notice that the pushy American in me is already looking to manipulate this.)
