Comment on Systematic Lucky Breaks

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 16:21:34 GMT

What do the examples have to do with "luck"?

At least 2 of the initial occurrences-the game night working so well and happening to hear about an important market trend-were not caused by any deliberate action on my part. They were basically random and unexpected. Systematizing them and making them continue to happen was not luck, but that's the point of the post.

My understanding of luck is a situation where the circumstances "break" in your favor regardless of your attention or intention, or even in opposition to most likely outcome. (e.g. I was lucky not to get injured when X happened and many poeple around me were injured.)

People frequently refer to one-off positive events as "lucky breaks", which is why I used that phrase. But I don't care about the word luck specifically. The point of the post is to take one-off positive events or things that worked unexpectedly well and make them happen repeatedly and automatically.

What I see described in this post is something much closer to my concept of "common sense". Is there some very valuable and novel aspect to the content I am overlooking?

Most people don't respond to positive events by setting them up to happen automatically and repeatedly in their lives. The lesson is not "do things you enjoy", it's "take something that worked really well and set it up so that it happens consistently without conscious effort on your part."

Very few people respond to an unexpected positive event with "now I'll set up a system to make this happen repeatedly." Humans are generally good at repeatedly doing things that they intentionally tried and worked well, but not good at spotting the things that happened without effort on their part, but which could be copied and repeated. The game night is again a good example-I didn't set up the initial game night, somebody else did. But I noticed that I enjoyed the game night a lot and got a lot of value out of it, so I set up a repeating game night at my apartment every two weeks.

I encourage people to focus on the "lucky breaks", because those are common blind spots. Another important factor was taking a systematic approach ("let's set up a repeating biweekly game night") as opposed to an effortful approach ("I should attend more game nights.")

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