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by
Gunther Max
Read between
September 5 - September 9, 2018
Why do people deny the role of luck? For one thing, we hate to think we are at the mercy of random happenings. We prefer to stay snugly wrapped in the illusion that we control our own destinies.
Another reason why we prefer not to discuss luck’s role is that it diminishes us and steals our dignity.
“Character is destiny,”
It turns out that lucky people characteristically organize their lives in such a way that they are in position to experience good luck and to avoid bad luck.
Never confuse luck with planning.
“I’m where I am partly because of good luck,” he kept reminding himself. “But luck can change. Luck is lifting me up today. Tomorrow it may drop me.”
The first step in controlling your luck is to recognize that it exists.
The commandment of the Second Technique is: Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
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.
Go where events flow fastest. Specifically what does that mean? It means, simply, make contact with people. Get involved. Don’t be a sideliner, watching events flow past. Plunge into the events yourself.
There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take goofy risks; that is, risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. And the other is to take no risks at all.
It is essential to take risks. 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.
No matter how you define success, risk is a necessary ingredient of every successful life. Risk puts you in position to win.
Always assume a given run will be short. You will virtually always be right. The law of averages is heavily on your side.
What was the secret of his success?” He replied, “Not being greedy.”
The lucky reaction is to wait a short time and see if the problems can be fixed or will go away, and then, if the answer is no, bail out. Cut losses short. This is what lucky people habitually do. To put it another way, they have the ability to select their own luck. Hit with bad luck, they discard it, freeing themselves to seek better luck in another venture.
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, you will miss nearly everything.
By avoiding excessive communication, lucky men and women are freed of the need to explain and justify actions to other people.
The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.
How can it teach a moral lesson to punish somebody without saying what lesson is supposed to be learned? Any sensible parent knows that if you are going to spank a child, you should make sure the child knows what it’s for.
Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.
