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| Making your own luck is better than waiting for fate |
If you can make your own luck there is nothing like luck at all!
This is an apocryphal story of 2
friends Moshe and Oram. Like any good friends there is a fair bit of competition
between them and Oram always wins. Moshe always complains that Oram is lucky;
he is a natural winner, has more ability and beats him at almost everything
they do.
Moshe challenges his friend to beat
him at a game of pure luck where winning is by pure chance and ability counts
for nothing.
Oram proposes a game where there is a
jar containing 100 marbles. Each player takes turns in drawing any number of
marbles between 1 and ten. The player who empties the last marble from the jar
wins.
He argues that it is such a random
game of chance that no one can predict who will win. Moshe agrees that it is
fair and they start to play.
Oram wins the 1st game and
also the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and the 5th …………..
How does he do it yet again? Oram
smiles mysteriously while Moshe clutches his head and mutters “ I told you I’m
cursed!”
Is luck a quirk of fate?
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| Luck doesn't happen by chance |
Anything in life that we do, there are
2 outcomes, success or failure (for simplicity let’s leave out partial outcomes).
If left to luck can I safely say that my chances of success or failure are 50% each?
Consider a simple example of a coin
flip. My chances of coming up a head or tails are 50% since there are only 2
possible outcomes and there is no way I can influence the outcome and I depend
totally on fate.
If I flip the coin I may come up heads
or tails, no way to predict which. It is possible that if I flip the coin again
I may come up either 2 heads or 2 tails in a row. It is possible to get 4 heads
or tails in a row and strange but not impossible 10 of the same heads or tails
in a row.
But statistically the probability of
getting a head is about the same as a tails and if you like you can prove it by
flipping a coin 100 times or even more and the probability of heads or tails
will approach 50%. This is also called the law of large numbers.
Applying the same principal to the
game played by Oram and Moshe, the latter should have won an equal number of
times as his friend. But as you can see that’s not the case so we can concur
that it is not purely a game of luck and that Oram is positively influencing
the outcome.
Similarly if Oram excels at everything
he does it has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with his ability,
attitude and character. Otherwise Moshe would share 50% of Oram’s achievements
as nature distributes all outcomes evenly over a long period of time.
The game of life has nothing to do
with chance!
The 50:50 rule of luck
would make winners out of us all!
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| Luck doesn't distribute equally |
If I played
the stock markets I should make money 50% of the time because either the
markets go up or they go down and I can only be wrong half the time.
This is
probably the mental state of most amateur stock market traders who seek safety
in numbers. But empirically it is only some key players who consistently make
money in a market notorious for unpredictability and chaos. How that is
possible when there is no definite science to stock market movement?
Why some people succeed in
the game without rules
I am going
to list some of the attributes of people who regularly come up as winners in
life even though they face highly irrational and diverse situations where there
is no set of rules to guide them but first I want to state that there are no
natural or inborn winners and anyone can inculcate the winning habits of
successful people
The decisive factor in
a crunch situation is You!!!
I have just
spent a better part of this post in proving to you that there is no destiny or DNA,
mojo or jinx which decides who wins or not, it is something as down to earth as
some highly effective habits and attitudes which are easier to integrate in our
lives than to go about your life thinking you have bad karma
· Winners play by the rules but know when to throw the rule book out
· Winners are flexible in their
approach and don’t take fixed or rigid positions which are difficult to wriggle
out of
· Winners do fail!!! But they learn
from failure
· Winners are not afraid to fail
· Winners don’t believe success is a
result of luck
· Winners prepare for success
· Winners don’t leave to fate anything
they can do something about.
· Winners don’t jump into battle until
they have assured victory before entering battle
· Winners don’t take risks they cannot
tolerate
· Winners factor in the most adverse
outcomes and then see if they can survive it
· Winners don’t stick to conventional methods,
they are willing to think out of the box,
· They question all premises and leave
no stone unturned.
· Winners don’t take anything for
granted and don’t leave any blind spots in their thinking.
· Winners go the extra mile. As such
there is no traffic on the extra mile!!!
· Winners don’t carry any extra baggage
of pre-conceived notions.
· Winners don’t rest on their laurels
but keep learning exponentially
Psychology of luck
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| Fortune favors the brave |
Julius
Caesar for all his fabled luck was an able and daring general and when Napoleon
said “ I don’t care if my generals are good I want them lucky” what he really
meant was a combination of brains, daring and preparation that constitutes luck
as we know it
So how does Oram do it?
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| Winning is a habit |
As you probably guessed there is no
luck involved only preparation and some good old mathematics.
No matter who goes first in drawing
marbles from the jar, Oram makes sure that the number of marbles left in the
jar after his turn is in a multiple of 11. This way whatever the number of
marbles Moshe draws in his last turn Oram always wins!
In the beginning: 100 Marbles
Case 1: Oram draws First
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Case 2: Moshe draws first
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O: 1, M: 6 Remaining: 93
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M: 1 O: 2 Remaining: 97
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O: 5 M: 3 Remaining: 85
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M: 8, O: 1 Remaining 88
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O: 7 M: 10 Remaining: 67
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M: 5, O: 6 Remaining 77
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O: 1 M: 7 Remaining: 59
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M: 4, O: 7 Remaining 66
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O: 4 M: 8 Remaining: 47
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M: 7, O: 4 Remaining 55
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O: 3 M: 9 Remaining: 35
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M: 6, O: 5 Remaining 44
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O: 2 M: 5 Remaining 28
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M: 9, O: 2 Remaining 33
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O: 6 M: 4 Remaining 18
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M: 3, O: 8 Remaining 22
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O: 7 M: 2 Remaining 9
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M: 2, O: 9 Remaining 11
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O: 9
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M: 5, O: 6 Remaining 0
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Oram wins!
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Oram wins!
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In conclusion your fate is not
described by what happens to you but how you deal with what happens to you!!!
