We love to tell ourselves that we’re the true authors of our own lives, but if you sit in silence for five minutes and trace things back, you realize how much of this whole experience is a bit like a cosmic roll of the dice. You didn’t pick the year you were born, the parents who raised you, Every day we wake up trying to steer our little ship, but we forget that we didn’t choose the weather, the current, or the boat we were handed.
This is where the line between “luck” and “skill” gets incredibly blurry. We love to praise people for being disciplined, focused, or emotionally stable, treating those traits like moral achievements. But the ability to sit still for eight hours, resist short-term temptation, or bounce back quickly from a failure is tied to neurological hardware you didn’t engineer.
Is luck important in life, or is it only important because our control over reality is limited?
One time when I was fifteen, I had to sit with my grandfather overnight in the hospital. Other relatives came from time to time, so I was free to wander the halls.
I passed an open door and looked in. There were about a dozen kids in beds, some of them in bad shape.
It was the first time that I was slapped hard by the notion that there, but for the grace of God, go I.
Yeah, luck is important.
On the other hand, I’ve known people who worked hard and got ahead. It’s tricky not to think of them as at least partially responsible for their success.
If you want to be happy you need to remember that all lives end with loss but in between happiness is easy to obtain. Also remember that much of what happens to us is governed by chance: know it when it adds and when it subtracts, because what really matters is wisdom and friendship. There are no two lessons more important and more often forgotten.
I prefer the word “random.” Randomness is the rule of life.
A star exploded in a supernova 5 billion years ago in this area of space and eventually gave birth to a second-generation star, our Sun. Planets formed and on the third rock from the Sun life evolved and then so did photosynthesis and this put oxygen in the atmosphere and then aerobic organisms evolved and then they crawled onto land and eventually bipedal primates evolved and then they migrated out of Africa and developed agriculture and (and meanwhile the DNA that would eventually be the blueprint for me kept surviving) and … fast forward … my grandparents, both new immigrants to Canada, had my parents, and then my dad met my mom and they had me (and six others), and I happened to meet my husband, and ended up living here. Husband died of MS. Niece currently has cancer. Had to wash some insect larva out of my compost container.
All random.
Yes, of course, I made a lot happen in my life. But life has a way of throwing curve balls.
Rota fortuna. \to Regnabo \to Regno \to Regnavi \to Sum sine regno \to
Luck is the chanciness of things. You want to go to a movie. It’s at 8:00 PM, at a theater 2 clicks away. Will you cab it or bus it? Will you find a cab or catch the bus on time? Will you get into a traffic jam or will there be some other kind of hold up? When you arrive at the theater, will you be able to get a ticket? Has your wallet fallen out in the cab/bus? Will there be a power outage? Etcetera. These are all luck.
Luck is winning the lottery without buying a ticket.
im not joking hard work and labour is its own reward too and goals are helpful in giving one things to strive for. We may face adversity in the face of it, give up but the human spirit is indomitable. And that’s what luck is in my eyes perseverance can lead to fortunes.
Now I don’t wish to be misunderstood because fortune can also be a curse … so what is luck then?
I think it’s got two values which are interchangeable those are truth and falsehood.
I was thinking about something similar recently. The idea that beauty isn’t really something someone earns. You’re just born with it. But then that also made me think intelligence is probably just as much genetic as beauty.
You can put in effort and work hard to learn new things, but you can’t necessarily increase your ability to comprehend complex information. If that’s true, then intelligence is nothing more to be proud of than beauty. That got me wondering, what is there to be proud of, to like about oneself if it’s all just a random roll of the dice.
But there is one thing specifically we do get control over and that is the choices we make today. Do we choose to help others, to learn, to understand, to better ourselves or do we choose to blame others, only help ourselves, stay rigid in our beliefs, etc.? While the value you place on the things I’ve listed may vary, you can be proud of the choices you make that align with your values.
I say all this to answer your question as we do lack control in some ways and especially at the start of our lives. But we also have control in other ways. So “luck” matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. And maybe not the most important.
Like for a surfer on the waves, no-one is successful without incoming opportunities. When you find a wave, you can work hard and reach far, or just go with the flow and reach just as far or crash against a rocky shore.
If you do the best you can under given circumstances, then you’re as successful as you can be.
Without opportunities, you’re more successful taking it easy than working hard and getting nowhere.
Some luck is not entirely random as if out of thin air. Feng shui is one example. Your success, according to this belief, is affected by how you arrange your immediate surrounding. Though luck is not guaranteed, it’s one of those that takes your own effort to attract luck.
IMHO, some of us have to put in only a minimum of effort and still put the decent in decent life. Others have to make an extra effort for just that. I’ve seen all sorts of people - successes and failures - and some are amazing narrative-worthy stories of grow, diversify, grow, diversify. Lather, rinse, repeat. In the modern world the bigger the prize the greater the risk. Take the downfall of the 200 year old Barings bank in 1995 as a case in point.
I reject your premise only because these qualities aren’t inherently important to begin with, they only can be when certain factors are at play. You also state that someone doesnt pick the year they were born. To simeone who follows fatalism this isn’t true, it’s the opposite. What happens is these qualities of luck or hard work emerge as being important through experiences and subjective worth.
Does one need luck or hard work to be successful?
-One can have no luck and be a hard worker and still do well in life or horrible.
-One can have luck and no hard work and still do well in life or horrible.
-One can have both luck and be a hard worker and do well or horrible in life.
-One can have neither luck or be a hard worker and do well or horrible in life.
You can construct a boolean truth table and come to the same conclusion under fatalism. It doesn’t matter. Under free will it does. If you are the pilot of your ship as you call it, than you are a layer in between these two truths and it depends upon how much control you actually have. There might be people who really can control the weather. There puppets are callled meteorologists. Fear those darn mutants.
(One final note. Some people consider winning the lottery as being lucky. People have gone broke and regardless of how you judge their decision making skills upon receiving the wealth, consider it as one of the worst expierences of their life. The lesson here is luck itself can be bound by being either positive or negative. Don’t forget that negative luck can also apply to your life events.)
I like Elon Musk, however, he’s quick to boast about how much he works. Yet, it’s extremely high profit, his work- and he is the leader so his work kind is lax.
The starting place/luck for most people, is more grueling work than Elon Musk does. There is no guaranteed you’ll pass the first job you do; you may get promoted.
At the start of one’s work career, in most cases, is bad luck.
The state, rather than educating, and in an orderly manner, put the educated into a fixed job, and maybe even community, and place of living, the state prefers a lot of random and to sell the good life.
The start of work-career is demoralising. Elon Musk, on the other hand, his work, is good for morale.
We must hold people responsible for their actions, despite the results of those actions being the result overwhelmingly of luck. We are only partly in control of the results of our acts, and yet responsible for those outcomes.
The very American idea that the rich have some moral standing ignores this. The idea that wealth confers moral standing mistakes luck for merit. What people achieve depends to a large extent on circumstances, opportunities, abilities and outcomes over which they have little control.
There is a profound difference between a wanker like Musk choosing to work long hours and a serf having no choice but to work long hours. That someone works hard does not establish the moral significance of their effort.
Nor is it clear that the ability to work hard is somehow a matter of free choice. It may be, but it surprises me how people often just take this for granted.
The presumption that choosing hard work has moral standing is unjustified. The notion that folk receive what they deserve because of their efforts does not survive a look around the room.
We could just refuse to tag “what we deserve” to anything involving effort, and still raise the question: But there is such a thing as deserving X or not deserving Y, isn’t there? To me that’s the more interesting question. If we don’t throw out the whole idea of deserts entirely, then what might they be based on?