“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” – Seneca
“Chance favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur
- Four Kinds of Luck (inspired by swyx)
- You just get lucky.
- Accidental Luck: $100 on the street.
- Hustle until you stumble.
- Active Luck: Winning a lottery. At least you bought the ticket yourself.
- “Chance favors the prepared mind.”
- Prepared Luck: The luck you get from noticing that something lucky has happened, that most would miss. Where they see miracle, you see luck.
- The canonical story on this is Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, which was a huge medical breakthrough. The discovery was a total accident (some mold happened to fall in the right spot + Fleming happened to see it + he had a similar experience that was a nonevent 9 years ago), but Fleming was not only “uniquely equipped to observe it” by his background, he took action to confirm the observation.
“Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say: “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”” – Gian-Carlo Rota
- Prepared Luck: The luck you get from noticing that something lucky has happened, that most would miss. Where they see miracle, you see luck.
- Luck finds you. Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. People will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.
- Magnetic Luck: Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave.
- You just get lucky.
Related:
Contradictory?develop :
Tychism - Peirce’s sub-theory on chance as fundamental to the Universe, which anticipates the quantum physics