How To Get Lucky - FinanceInsights

13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life’s good breaks

by Max Gunther

There is the saying – “If you’re good, you don’t need luck.” What nonsense. Of course you need luck. For instance, it doesn’t matter how good a football player you are. If you have the bad luck to trip on a loose stair runner and sprain your ankle the night before the big game, none of your hard-earned strengths and skills are going to do you the least bit of good.

Luck. It blunders in and out of our lives, unbidden, unexpected, sometimes welcome and sometimes not. It plays a role in all our affairs, often the commanding role. No matter how carefully you design your life, you cannot know how that design will be changed by the working of random events. You can only know the events will occur. You can only wait for them and hope they are in your favor.

You cannot control your luck in a precise way. But you can bring about a substantial and even startling improvement in the quality of your luck.

If you believe you are in perfect control of your life, you are kidding yourself. You owe your very existence to a chancy event that happened before you were born: the coming together of your mother and father.

Lucky people characteristically organize their lives in such a way that they are in position to experience good luck and to avoid bad luck.

13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life’s good breaks:

The First Technique: Making the Luck/Planning Distinction

Every run of luck must end sooner or later.
When you enjoy a winning streak, you are safe as long as you see clearly what part of it was brought about by planning and what part by luck.
The lucky approach is to say to yourself, “Okay I’m going to get into this risky situation-this roulette game, this mutual fund investment. But I am not operating under the delusion that planning will make it turn out my way. I see luck looming large in it, so I will be careful not to let myself grow too confident and relaxed. I will expect rapid change. I won’t make large, irrevocable commitments. I’ll stay poised to bail out the minute I see a change I don’t like.”
Planning may be more important than luck in much of what you do. The trick is to know what kind of situation you are in at any given time. Can you rely on your own or others’ planning, or will the outcome be determined by luck?
The first step in controlling your luck is to recognize that it exists.

The Second Technique: Finding the Fast Flow

Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
“If you’re a hermit, nothing ever happens in your life. If you’re the opposite of a hermit, things happen.”
The lucky personality gets to know everybody in sight: the rich and the poor, the famous, the humble, the sociable and even the friendless and the cranky.
People should know who you are, what work you do, what your interests are, what kinds of rewards you look for in life. It is necessary for them to know what you would consider a lucky break.
Make contact with people. Get involved. Don’t be a sideliner, watching events flow past. Plunge into the events yourself.

The Third Technique: Risk Spooning

There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. And the other is to take no risks at all.
Take risks in carefully measured spoonfuls.
If you want luck to come around and change your life, you must initially be willing to accept either good or bad luck. That is another way of saying you must take a risk.
Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely to happen to you.
It is essential to study risk-reward ratios. When a given risk is small and a potential reward large, you might as well take the risk and so position yourself to become a winner.
Start small. The very least degree of risk you should expose yourself to is the degree associated with a typical state lottery, in which tiny amounts are bet against long odds in the hope of monumental rewards.
No matter how you define success, risk is a necessary ingredient of every successful life. Risk puts you in position to win.

The Fourth Technique: Run Cutting

“Don’t push your luck,” says the ancient maxim. Only the lucky really understand what it means.
Runs of luck always end sooner than you wish.
Preserve your gains by jumping off early in the game. Always assume the run is going to be short. Never try to ride a run to its very peak. Don’t push your luck.
Always assume a given run will be short. You will virtually always be right. The law of averages is heavily on your side.

The Fifth Technique: Luck Selection

“Cut your losses,” they tell each other on Wall Street. Though few can do it well or consistently, it is still good advice. And it doesn’t apply only to the stock market. It applies everywhere.
If you are hit with bad luck, discard it, free yourself to seek better luck in another venture.

The Sixth Technique: The Zigzag Path

The lucky, alert to the luck/planning distinction, are aware that life is always going to be a turbulent sea of opportunities drifting randomly past in all directions. If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead (with your eyes fixed on your goal), you will miss nearly everything.
If a piece of potential good luck drifts your way, you should not summarily reject it simply because it doesn’t fit some predesigned plan.

The Seventh Technique: Constructive Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism is defined as any belief in an unseen spirit, force, or agency whose existence hasn’t been proved to everybody’s satisfaction.
Lucky people tend to be supernaturalists. Some are devoutly religious, while others harbor the most peculiar superstitions.
A supernatural belief, even a trivial and humorous one, helps people get lucky by helping them make otherwise impossible choices.
A supernatural belief enables the player to get into a potentially winning position.
“A superstition won’t do you any harm as long as you don’t use it as a substitute for thinking,” said Charles Goren, the bridge master.

The Eighth Technique: Worst-Case Analysis

Optimistic people, despite their cheery smiles and sunny dispositions, usually lead unlucky lives. Optimism means expecting the best, but good luck involves knowing how you will handle the worst.

The Ninth Technique: The Closed Mouth

Unnecessary talk can become a barrier against lucky breaks. eg. “I’ve never liked Marie much,” you confide to a group one day. The next day, in one of those unpredictable shifts, Marie finds herself in a position to direct a lucky break your way. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?
Words can come back to haunt you. Silence almost never does.
The luckiest people guard against unnecessary talk. They are particularly careful when talking of subjects that have great personal importance to them. They reveal no more of their thinking than they have to. They don’t lock themselves into positions where there is no good reason to do so. Typically, others think of them as somewhat mysterious. “I never really know what’s going through her head.” And that is as it should be.
You can make friends as easily by listening, really listening, as you can by generating great heaps of words. Indeed, nonstop talk can irritate people – especially those who wish to be nonstop talkers themselves.
Silence doesn’t only protect you from getting locked into unwanted positions, and it doesn’t only keep you from revealing facts and feelings you may not want known. It has one other great virtue. By avoiding excessive communication, lucky men and women are freed of the need to explain and justify actions to other people.
Since life is ruled by luck and you can never predict what actions you will need to take, it is best to say as little as possible about what you are doing and thinking. Then, when action is required, the only person you must argue with is yourself. That is often tough enough.

The Tenth Technique: Recognizing a Nonlesson

“Twice in a row I had a hunch about a stock but didn’t buy it, and the doggone stock doubled. I’ve sure learned my lesson! Next hunch I get, I’m going to back it with everything I’ve got!” A good piece of learning? No, a potentially disastrous one. All the investor has really learned is that good and bad luck happen.
The lucky know what they can’t learn anything from.
The belief that history is going to repeat itself is a nonlesson.
History simply does not repeat itself. Why should it? History is the product of what billions of men and women are doing, thinking, and feeling at a given time. It is in constant flux. It is entirely unpredictable.
You can often predict what one individual will do, but only in rare circumstances can you predict what a lot of people will do.

The Eleventh Technique: Accepting an Unfair Universe

Fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it. In other words, life is never fair.
Never go into a venture thinking it will come out right for you because you “deserve” it. That is a common expectation of the unlucky. The universe has no interest in what you deserve. Nor is the universe interested in the “my turn” expectation, also common among the unlucky. This, too, comes from the assumption that the universe is fair.

The Twelfth Technique: The Juggling Act

Think of some lucky people you know, and then think of some you consider unlucky. One highly visible difference is almost sure to stand out: The luckier are the busier.
Even at the height of success in a major venture such as a career, the lucky man or woman will usually have secondary ventures going or in preparation or under study – sometimes in bewildering variety.
But if the lucky individual seems busy when things are going well, you will find him or her still busier in adversity. Yes, the lucky have their ups and downs like anybody else. The difference is that, with the lucky, down periods never last long and often end in surprising, unforeseen ways.
If Venture A turns sour or simply turns stagnant and unexciting, maybe Venture B or C will burst into flames in some unexpected way.
The lucky life is indeed characterized by a degree of hustle and bustle that seems frantic at times especially to the chronically unlucky. As a candidate for good luck you will find yourself juggling many ventures that compete for your time and attention. Your life will be a whirl of people as you seek the fast flow. Instead of plodding toward a distant goal in a straight line, you will often be distracted by unexpected new opportunities that pop up to your left and right, and each one will require new decisions and more actions.

The Thirteenth Technique: Destiny Pairing

A person who alters your luck over a long term may be called a destiny partner.
How do you meet your destiny partner? It usually happens by blind luck.

Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.

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