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Can We Do Better Than Relying On Luck?
Why our fraught relationship with fortune isn’t reliable — or sustainable.
If there is anything worse than relying on luck, it must be to curse it when we do so and things don’t go as expected.
I bet my only home on the dice, I let cards determine the state of my bank account, I allow Russian roulette to decide whether I live or not… then I complain when I don’t get my way. Granted, those sound like extreme scenarios, but I see too many important life decisions left to luck. I hear far too many people complain that fortune has turned her back on them. Really? I would be extremely worried if anything I truly cared about depended on luck.
Naturally, luck plays a big role in all of our lives. The people we bump in, the adverts we see, the accidents that come our way or not, the families we are born into, the fortune of those around us… there is very little that we can do to influence any of it. Or is there?
Sure, we can’t plan to come across someone who will offer us our dream job or an opportunity to partner up and do great things we couldn’t do alone, but even when luck has something to say, there is more to it: the reason we know that key person, the reason that key person trusts us when the opportunity arises, those aren’t random reasons. We don’t just…