I. Superstition
I use to have a lucky pair of swimming goggles. They were neon green, the color of speed, and when I looked through them I felt like I was seeing the world how plants see the world, all blinding greens and yellows. I remember when I would take them off everything would seem faded, like the summer sun had bleached out the true colors of the day. The goggles were lucky, which I knew because every time I would wear them at swim meets I would win my races. Of course, the truth was that I was 8 years old, and the real luck I had was (1) a natural gift for swimming and (2) a backyard pool and (3) minimal competition. But as a kid, it was the goggles, so I wore them every day at practice even though they made my nose bridge bleed.
Luck is the most important determining factor in our lives. I’d rather be lucky than just about anything else. Chance contributes to who we date and marry, if we're athletic, attractive, charming, or intelligent. The luck of where we’re born and who our parents are determines our potential to experience healthy relationships and the quality of education, which (when combined with chance encounters and lucky breaks) lead to the careers, trajectories, hobbies we pursue, and who become our friends and neighbors. Whether we get eaten by a shark or win the lottery or grow up to be a magician or a glassblower or a management consultant is all the luck of the draw. Luck makes up the core of who we are and what we have in life. It’s everything, which is why we can't help but grasp for a way to control it. Can we?
People have been trying to gain good luck and avoid bad luck for millennia. If you want good luck in 18th century Britain, shake a chimney sweep’s hand. In ancient Egypt, you might carry a hedgehog amulet on a string. In 700BCE China, consider acquiring a lucky cricket. But good luck is just the half of it. The fears of Protestant Christians about satanic rituals and witchcraft are why you should avoid black cats. And did you know that walking under ladders desecrates the symbol of the holy trinity? Never do that. Or break a mirror, lest the souls trapped within escape and torment you for the rest of your life. Quant and silly though these superstitions may be to us now, most of us can’t help but breathe a prayer when we see basketball or football mid-arc. And are you going to tell me that when it really matters you don’t knock on wood? I do.
Much research has been done on the power of superstition and belief. Most of it has searched for a link between superstition and its impact on uncontrollable effects, such as if a good luck charm could impact one’s success on guessing whether a coin flips heads or tails. Of course, it doesn’t. But some has actually shown a moderate measurable effect for the power of luck. Lysann Damisch et al, 2010 ran a now famous experiment that tasked subjects to attempt golf putts. Interestingly, they found that subjects who were told their golf ball had been a lucky ball so far scored more hole-in-one putts than a comparison group. Considering the experiment was done with only 28 subjects, I’m agnostic as to whether the experiment would replicate (surprise! I looked further into it and turns out it didn’t), but the reason this type of story is so compelling is that it seems obvious that luck, if you believe in it, seems like it would offer a shortcut to confidence, which has been linked with performance.
It’s a pretty common assumption that in the world of sports, conscious thinking can get in the way. “I was in my head” is something you’ll constantly get from athletes who flub a free throw, a golf swing, or a pitch. The rule is: don’t overthink it. Lucky charms and superstitious rituals may not connect with anything deeper than the ingrained neural pathways that can lead to a mindset of confidence, becoming a powerful placebo that allows elite athletes (and the rest of us) to perform without worrying about our performance, which could allow us to perform a bit better.
II. Coincidence
How do we know if a result is the effect of luck or skilled intention? Let’s talk about Nazis.
The world’s first guided ballistic missile was developed by the German war machine in World War II and called the Vergeltungswaffe 2, or "Retribution Weapon 2". The V-2 was supersonic, meaning that it would hit with no audible warning, and carried a 1000kg warhead leaving craters “66 feet wide and 26 feet deep, ejecting approximately 3,000 tons of material into the air.” From September 1944 through March 1945, German forces launched over 3,000 V-2 missiles as a last ditch attempt to influence the war outcome. While the new weapon failed at changing the trajectory of the war, it was very successful in creating widespread terror and conspiracy in the target cities during the months of bombing. In London, for example, theories abound that the Nazis were targeting specific streets and locations with their missiles, and Londoners looking at maps of the bomb sites started seeing patterns. Areas that were spared by bombs were suspected to be strongholds of Nazi sympathizers, while people abandoned areas that had clusters of bombs, thinking that those neighborhoods were specific targets likely to be bombed again. All the worry was misguided, however, as the guidance systems of the missiles had a margin of error of a few miles, and if that wasn’t enough, statistical analysis of the bomb sites show that the distribution was as close to random as you’d expect. Turns out it was just dumb luck.
It’s often difficult to determine if what we’re experiencing has deeper meaning, or is a random streak or cluster within a truly random sequence. Seeing signal within noise is in our nature, even if that signal is bogus. We tend to underestimate the amount of variability that naturally occurs within random sequences of events. Knowing that a coin toss is 50:50, if you get 9 heads in a row, it feels like the next flip can’t possibly be a heads again (the gambler’s fallacy), even though we’re told that the probability for the next flip remains at 50:50. But within every run of chance events, streaks happen naturally. This is a phenomenon known as the clustering illusion, and it does something to explain our superstitious nature.
10 heads in a row:
10 heads in a row with context:
There are certain areas of life where signal vs noise is obvious, such as in learning how to swim or make pottery or HAM radio. But much of life is rife with randomness and chance. Is it really possible to continuously beat the market as a retail investor, or are those retail investors who do just statistical inevitabilities of a random distribution? And what about in life, careers, marriages, etc? We may not be able to harness luck to win in at games of true chance, but being that we are a point on the Poisson distribution ourselves, it is a statistical inevitability that we will find ourselves faced with opportunities that will pay off big time. This is the luck we can control. How can we tell what and when they are?
III. The ‘secret’ of luck.
If most of our lives are determined by a roll of the proverbial dice, and if we accept that lucky events or opportunities will exert a dramatic course shift in our lives, is there a real way to control luck? According to Richard Wiseman, yes.
In his book The Luck Factor, Wiseman investigates how to increase the positive opportunities that arise naturally throughout our lives. His hypothesis is that true difference between self-proclaimed lucky people and unlucky people was openness to opportunity. So he found subjects who considered themselves to be lucky and unlucky, and ran experiments to look at how open they were to opportunities right in front of them. In one experiment, he asked his two groups to count how many pictures were in a newspaper as fast as possible. It took the unlucky group on average about 2 minutes, but the lucky group finished in just seconds. Can luck enhance performance that much? Not at all. The lucky group saw something the unlucky group missed: a blatant half-page ad on the second page that said “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”
According to Wiseman, the people who consider themselves lucky tended to be people who rated higher on extraversion and openness to experience, which is perhaps unsurprising, but the good news is that he also found that for self-proclaimed lucky and unlucky people, extraverts or not, he found that it is possible to increase people’s perceived luck by training them in different four basic skills:
Creating and noticing chance opportunities
Listening to intuitions
Create self-fulfilling positive prophesies via positive expectations
Resilience in the face of bad luck that turns bad things into opportunities
These simple ideas are not new ideas at all, but what Wiseman adds to the story of luck is evidence that we are not immutable and stuck with the luck we feel we have. It is possible, and fairly easy for most of us to change a few habits in order to maximize opportunities that could change our lives for the better.
It won’t, of course, help you win at the blackjack tables or in games of dice, but for the places that it really matters; in our careers, friends, hobbies, and chance opportunities, playing the game right might make you extraordinarily lucky. With a little nudge, we can all feel like I feel. Extremely, extremely lucky. Why? You know it—I’ve still got those green goggles.
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Ep 10. The Secrets of Luck