I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
-Jean Cocteau
Well, since this is our 13th episode, I figured we should take full advantage and use this opportunity to discuss luck.
The number 13 and its superstition.
Per the History Channel,
Researchers estimate that as many as 10 percent of the U.S. population has a fear of the number 13, and each year the even more specific fear of Friday the 13th, known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, results in financial losses in excess of $800 million annually, as people avoid marrying, traveling or in the most severe cases, even working.
But what’s so unlucky about the number 13, and how did this numerical superstition get started?
An early myth surrounding the origin of the fear involved one of the world’s oldest legal documents, the Code of Hammurabi, which reportedly omitted a 13th law from its list of legal rules. In reality, the omission was no more than a clerical error made by one of the document’s earliest translators who failed to include a line of text—in fact, the code doesn’t numerically list its laws at all.
Number 12: A perfect Number?
Western cultures have historically associated the number 12 with completeness (there are 12 days of Christmas, 12 months and zodiac signs, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 gods of Olympus and 12 tribes of Israel, just to name a few examples), its successor 13 has a long history as a sign of bad luck.
Mathematicians and scientists, meanwhile, point to the preeminence of the number 12, often considered a “perfect” number, in the ancient world. The ancient Sumerians developed numeral system based on the use of 12 that is still used for measuring time today. Most calendars have 12 months; a single day is comprised of two 12-hour half days, etc.
Following so closely on the heels of a “perfect” number, some argue, that 13 was sure to be found lacking and unusual.
This fear of the unknown would seem to play into two other popular theories for the number’s unlucky connotation, both of which revolve around the appearance of a 13th guest at two ancient events: In the Bible, Judas Iscariot, the 13th guest to arrive at the Last Supper, is the person who betrays Jesus. Meanwhile ancient Norse lore holds that evil and turmoil were first introduced in the world by the appearance of the treacherous and mischievous god Loki at a dinner party in Valhalla. He was the 13th guest, upsetting the balance of the 12 gods already in attendance.
13 Only Unlucky in the West?
It also seems as if unexplained fears surrounding the number 13 are a primarily Western construct. Some cultures, including the Ancient Egyptians, actually considered the number lucky, while others have simply swapped numbers as the base of their phobias—4 is avoided in much of Asia, for example.
According to the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina, more than 80 percent of hi-rise buildings in the United States do not have a 13th floor, and the vast majority of hotels, hospitals and airports avoid using the number for rooms and gates as well.
But in much of East and Southeast Asia, where tetraphobia is the norm, you’d be hard-pressed to find much use of the number 4 in private or public life, thanks to similar sounds for the Chinese language (and Chinese-influenced linguistic sub-groups) words for “four” and “death.”
The Thirteen Club
In the late-19th century, a New Yorker named Captain William Fowler (1827-1897) sought to remove the enduring stigma surrounding the number 13—and particularly the unwritten rule about not having 13 guests at a dinner table—by founding an exclusive society called the Thirteen Club.
The group dined regularly on the 13th day of the month in room 13 of the Knickerbocker Cottage, a popular watering hole Fowler owned from 1863 to 1883. Before sitting down for a 13-course dinner, members would pass beneath a ladder and a banner reading “Morituri te Salutamus,” Latin for “Those of us who are about to die salute you.”
Four former U.S. presidents (Chester A. Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and Theodore Roosevelt) would join the Thirteen Club’s ranks at one time or another.
Friday the 13th
On Friday, October 13, 1307, officers of King Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of the Knights Templar, a powerful religious and military order formed in the 12th century for the defense of the Holy Land.
Imprisoned on charges of various illegal behaviors (but really because the king wanted access to their financial resources), many Templars were later executed. Some cite the link with the Templars as the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition, but like many legends involving the Templars and their history, the truth remains murky.
An important milestone in the history of the Friday the 13th legend in particular (not just the number 13) occurred in 1907, with the publication of the novel Friday, the Thirteenth written by Thomas William Lawson.
The book told the story of a New York City stockbroker who plays on superstitions about the date to create chaos on Wall Street, and make a killing on the market.
In more recent times, a number of traumatic events have occurred on Friday the 13th, including the German bombing of Buckingham Palace (September 1940);
- the murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York (March 1964);
- a cyclone that killed more than 300,000 people in Bangladesh (November 1970);
- the disappearance of a Chilean Air Force plane in the Andes (October 1972);
- the death of rapper Tupac Shakur (September 1996)
- and the crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy, which killed 30 people (January 2012).
Very one of the events that occur(ed)on or around some person, place, or thing in proximity to the number 13 can only be described as happenstance. Not luck or a lack thereof. Things just happen. Take a look at every Tuesday the 13th in history and list all the events that happened there. My guess is one will find the same level of perceived tragedy and miss-fortune on those days too.
Way back in ancient Greece, the stoic philosopher Seneca gave us the definition of luck as it pertains to reality. He stated:
Luck is a matter of preparation for meeting opportunities.
In Episode 4, The Right Questions, we discussed how good explanations are hard to find, hard to vary, and falsifiable. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, or if you need a reminder here you go.
The words of David Deutsch, author of The Beginning of Infinity:
You only have the best explanation when you’ve found reasons to reject the rivals. Of course, not all possible rivals, because all possible rivals include the one that’s going to supersede the current best explanation.
If I want to explain something like, “How come the stars don’t fall down?” I can easily generate 60 explanations an hour and not stop, and say that the angels are holding them up, or they are really just holes in the firmament. Or I can say, “They are falling down and we better take cover soon.” Whereas, coming up with an explanation that contains knowledge—an explanation that’s better than just making stuff up—requires creativity and experimentation and interpretation, and so on. As (Karl) Popper says, knowledge is hard to come by (Popper, 1983; Andreessen, 2007). Because it’s hard to come by, it’s also hard to change once we’ve got it.
As we look at the above explanations for bad things being tied to the number 13, and its subsequent Friday the 13th, all are poor answers. None are hard to find, they are easy to vary, and all are not falsifiable, meaning they cannot be tested.
Examples: a killer cyclone hitting Bangladesh in 1970 on a Friday the 13th. How many other cyclones have occurred on other, non-Friday the 13th ‘s throughout history? Many more, I am sure. Thus, it is an easy-to-find, easy to vary, untestable explanation. Not a good one.
The Code of Hammurabi, Did not even have numerical listings of code and law. The 13th one, later found to be an error during translation, actually has nothing to do with the number 13. Bad explanation.
I can go on and on with this. Black Cats crossing your path (cats are a sign of good fortune in Japan, especially if they wave at you) (what if a racoon crosses your path and you crash your bicycle?), walking under ladders, stepping on a crack, wearing white before Labor Day? Not a superstition, just bad form, right?
So, lets look at some good explanations for what we call luck:
Modern day stoic guru and amazing author, Ryan Holiday posted on his October 3, 2019, blog, What is luck and What is Not.
I will read his thoughts now:
The philosopher and writer Nassim Taleb once said that, “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel, or a private jet.” His point was that certain accomplishments are within the reasonable grasp of someone making incremental gains each day. Outsized success and outlier accomplishments require that and extreme luck or timing.
This is worth considering for all of us who grew up being told the world was a meritocracy. Of course, it isn’t. Plenty of brilliant people fail to succeed for all sorts of reasons, and plenty of not-so-brilliant people find themselves successful beyond their wildest dreams. The world is a random, even cruel, place that does not always reward merit or hard work or skill. Sometimes it does, but not always.
Still, perhaps a more usable and practical distinction to make is not between hard work and luck, but between what is up to us and what is not up to us. This is the distinction that the Stoics tried to make and to think about always. Pioneering new research in science—that’s up to us. Being recognized for that work (e.g. winning a Nobel) is not. A committee decides that. The media decides that. Becoming an expert in a field, that’s up to us. We do that by reading, by studying, by going out and experiencing things. Being hired as a professor at Harvard to teach that expertise is not (think of all the people who weren’t hired there over the years because they were female, or Jewish, or Black). Writing a prize-worthy piece of literature—up to us. That’s time in front of the keyboard. That’s up to our genius. Being named as a finalist for the Booker Prize is not.
It’s not that luck, exactly, decides these things, but it is very clearly other people that make the decision. Marcus Aurelius said that the key to life was to tie our sanity—our sense of satisfaction—to our own actions. To tie it to what other people say or do (that was his definition of ambition) was to set ourselves up to be hurt and disappointed. It’s insanity. And it misses the point.
Ryan closes with:
Do the work. Be happy with that. Everything else is irrelevant.
Luck is not just about being in the right place at the right time. Richard Wiseman did a 10-year study “The Luck Factor” and came to the conclusion that:
Lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles.
- They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities.
- They make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition.
- They create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations.
- and they adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Marc Andreesen in his Pmarca blog titled:
Luck and the entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck
Has some great bits about “luck”. I am going to read you some now:
Luck is something that every successful entrepreneur will tell you plays a huge role in the difference between success and failure.
Many of those successful entrepreneurs will only admit this under duress, though, because if luck does indeed play such a huge role, then that seriously dents the image of the successful entrepreneur as an omniscient business genius.
Moreover, some of those people would shrug and say that luck is simply out of your hands. Sometimes you have it, sometimes you don’t.
But perhaps there’s more to it than that.
Dr. James Austin, a neurologist and philosopher (!), wrote an outstanding book called Chase, Chance, and Creativity — originally in 1978, then updated in 2003.
It’s the best book I’ve read on the role of luck, chance, and serendipity in medical research — or, for that matter, any creative endeavor.
And because he’s a neurologist, he has a grounding in how the brain actually exerts itself creatively — although there is more recent research on that topic that is even more illuminating (more on that later).
In the book, Dr. Austin outlines his theory of the four kinds of luck — or, as he calls it, chance; I will use the terms interchangeably.
First, he defines chance as follows: Chance…
something fortuitous that happens unpredictably without discernable human intention.
Yup, that’s luck.
Chance is unintentional, it is capricious, but we needn’t conclude that chance is immune from human interventions.
However, one must be careful not to read any unconsciously purposeful intent into “interventions”… [which] are to be viewed as accidental, unwilled, inadvertent, and unforeseeable.
Indeed, chance plays several distinct roles when humans react creatively with one another and with their environment… We can observe chance arriving in four major forms and for four different reasons. The principals involved affect everyone.
Here’s where it helps to be a neurologist writing on this topic: The four kinds of chance each have a different kind of motor exploratory activity (physical reaction) and a different kind of sensory receptivity (emotional reaction).
The [four] varieties of chance also involve distinctive personality traits and differ in the way one particular individual influences them.
OK, so what are they?
In Chance 1, the good luck that occurs is completely accidental. It is pure blind luck that comes with no effort on our part. Yup.
In Chance II, something else has been added — motion.
Years ago, when I was rushing around in the laboratory, someone admonished me by asking, “Why all the busyness? One must distinguish between motion and progress”.
Yes, at some point this distinction must be made. But it cannot always be made first. And it is not always made consciously.
True, waste motion should be avoided. But, if the researcher did not move until he was certain of progress he would accomplish very little… A certain [basic] level of action “stirs up the pot”, brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate.
Motion yields a network of new experiences which, like a sieve, works best when in constant up-and-down, side-to-side movement… Unluck runs out if you keep stirring up things so that random elements can combine, by virtue of you and their inherent amenities.
Sounds like a startup! Chance II springs from your energetic, generalized motor activities… the freer they are, the better. [Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering… had in mind when he said, “Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”
OK, now here’s where it gets interesting:
Now, as we move on to Chance III, we see blind luck, but it tiptoes in shoaly, dressed in camouflage. Chance presents only a faint clue, the potential opportunity exists, but it will be overlooked except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance.
Let us drill into that…
“Chance presents only a faint clue, the potential opportunity exists, but it will be overlooked except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance.”
This is why A New Order of Things exists. To assist you and me in understanding differing ideas from unlimited sciences, tasks, industry and more. So we can be what Marc Andreessen calls “that one person uniquely equipped”.
Okay, back to Marc…
Chance III involves a special receptivity, discernment, and intuitive grasp of significance unique to one particular recipient.
Louis Pasteur characterized it for all time when he said, “Chance favors the prepared mind”.
The classic example of [Chance III] occurred in 1928, when Sir Alexander Fleming’s mind instantly fused at least five elements into a conceptually united nexus [when he discovered penicillin — one of the most important medical breakthroughs ever]. He was at his work bench in the laboratory, made an observation, and his mental sequences then went something like this:
(1) I see that a mold has fallen by accident into my culture dish;
(2) the staphylococcal colonies residing near it failed to grow;
(3) therefore, the mold must have secreted something that killed the bacteria;
(4) this reminds me of a similar experience I had once before;
(5) maybe this new “something” from the mold could be used to kill staphylococci that cause human infections.
Actually, Fleming’s mind was exceptionally well prepared. Some nine years earlier, while suffering from a cold [you can’t make this stuff up], his own nasal drippings had found their way onto a culture dish. He noted that the bacteria around his mucous were killed, and astutely followed up the lead. His experiments then led him to discover… lysozyme… [which] proved inappropriate for medical use, but think of how receptive Fleming’s mind was to the penicillin mold when it later happened on the scene!
OK, what about Chance IV? [Chance IV] favors the individualized action. This is the fourth element in good luck — an active, but unintentional, subtle individualized prompting of it. Please explain!
Chance IV is the kind of luck that develops during a probing action which has a distinctive personal Flavor. The English Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, summed up the principle underlying Chance IV when he noted: “We make our fortunes and we call them fate.”
Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave. …Chance IV is so personal, it is not easily understood by someone else the first time around… here we probe into the subterranean recesses of personal hobbies and behavioral quirks that autobiographers know about, biographers rarely.
[In neurological terms], Chance III [is] concerned with personal sensory receptivity; its counterpart, Chance IV, [is] involved with personal motor behavior. [You] have to look carefully to find Chance IV for three reasons.
The first is that when it operates directly, it unfolds in an elliptical, unorthodox manner.
The second is that it only works indirectly.
The third is that some problems it may help solve are uncommonly difficult to understand because they have gone through a process of selection. We must bear in mind that, by the time Chance IV finally occurs, the easy, more accessible problems will already have been solved earlier by conventional actions, conventional logic, or by the operations of the other forms of chance.
What remains late in the game, then, is a tough core of complex, resistant problems. Such problems yield to none but an unusual approach… [Chance IV involves] a kind of discrete behavioral performance focused in a highly specific manner.
Here’s the money quote: Whereas the lucky connections in Chance II might come to anyone with disposable energy as the happy by-product of any aimless, circular stirring of the pot, the links of Chance IV can be drawn together and fused only by one quixotic rider cantering in on his own homemade hobby horse to intercept the problem at an odd angle.
Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway fame is adamant about the idea that to make good decisions one must have a collection of mental models. A mental model is a representation of how something works. We cannot handle all the details of the world in our brains, so we use mental models to help simplify the complex into understandable and organizable collections.
Mr. Munger famously stated:
“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form. You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience both vicarious and direct on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.”
In Episode 8: Bureaucracy, I mentioned “Ed Nuggets”. A couple decades or so ago this term was coined by a friend. I had/have a tendency to, upon a pertinent moment, drag some, what most seen as completely weird, piece of data, idea, or fact from the depths of my brain and announce it helpfully to the moment. These nuggets of knowledge have become a mainstay of my existence, Ed Nuggets. More often than not these pop into my consciousness at a perfectly timed moment of need and never make their way into the world verbally, but sometimes for the good of the group, they get to hear one.
Harken these to more apropos versions of Jerry McGuire’s: “Did you know the average human head weighs eight pounds?”
Ed Nuggets are the isolated facts acquired over the years that create my ever-growing latticework of theory. I did not plan it, I just work this way. I highly recommend that you start looking at those isolated facts(nuggets) in your brain and start creating your own latticework of theory. More on this in future episodes for sure!
Back to Mr. Andreesen:
A recap? Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.
Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.(Motion)
Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. (Latticework of Theory)
Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.
This of course leads to several challenges for how we live our lives as entrepreneurs and creators in any field:
- How energetic are we? How inclined towards motion are we? Those of you who read my first entrepreneur post will recognize that this is a variation on the “optimize for the maximum number of swings of the bat” principle. In a highly uncertain world, a bias to action is key to catalyzing success, and luck, and is open to be preferred to thinking things through more thoroughly.
- How curious are we? How determined are we to learn about our chosen field, other fields, and the world around us? In my post on hiring great people, I talked about the value I place on curiosity — and specifically, curiosity over intelligence. This is why. Curious people are more likely to already have in their heads the building blocks for creating a solution for any problem they come across, versus the more quote-unquote intelligent, but less curious, person who is trying to get by on logic and pure intellectual effort.
- How flexible and aggressive are we at synthesizing– at linking together multiple, disparate, apparently unrelated experiences on the fly? I think this is a hard skill to consciously improve, but I think it is good to start most creative exercises with the idea that the solution may come from any of our past experiences or knowledge, as opposed to out of a textbook or the mouth of an expert. (And, if you are a manager and you have someone who is particularly good at synthesis, promote her as fast as you possibly can.)
- How uniquely are we developing a personal point of view — a personal approach– a personal set of “eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors” that will uniquely prepare us to create? This, in a nutshell, is why I believe that most creative people are better off with more life experience and journeys afield into seemingly unrelated areas, as opposed to more formal domain-specific education — at least if they want to create.
In short, I think there is a roadmap to getting luck on our side, and I think this is it.
That ends Marcs thoughts…
Sir Richard Branson, in his 2014 book The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership, speaks specifically to this idea of luck being created not waited for.
He writes:
I believe that “luck” is one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated factors in life.
Those people and businesses that are generally considered fortunate or luckier than others are usually also the ones that are prepared to take the greatest risks and, by association, are also prepared to fall flat on their faces every so often.
In stark contrast, the “play it safe for fear of failing” brigade are the ones who just never seem to get as lucky as the risk-takers. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Sadly the vast majority of people seem to view their chances of “getting lucky” in much the same vein as the likelihood of being struck by lightning, as if it is something over which they have zero control. Well, in my humble opinion they couldn’t be further from the truth — anyone who wants to make the effort to work on their luck can and will seriously improve it.
Whether we look at Seneca, Wiseman, Austin, Holiday, Munger, Branson, or Andreesen’s thoughts on Luck and/or chance, I think it is easy to see that their explanations for how to achieve the good side of luck/chance are a) hard to find, b) hard to vary, and c) falsifiable. These explanations can be tested.
With all that being said, Luck is not left up to the gods, chance, direction of the wind, cats or ladders.
Here are a few quotes I found by some folks you may have heard of, about Luck.
- Diligence is the mother of good luck.- Benjamin Franklin
- I say luck is when opportunity comes along and you’re ready for it.- Denzel Washington
- The best luck of all is the luck you make for yourself. -Douglas MacArthur
- Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often. – Brian Tracy
- When it comes to luck, you make your own. -Bruce Springsteen
- Luck has nothing to do with it, because I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come. – Serena Williams
- Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.- Ray Kroc
- Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work – and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.- Lucille Ball
- Luck is not something you mention in the presence of self-made men.- E.B. White
Do you consider yourself a lucky or an unlucky person?
Are you waiting for things to happen?
Or, are you preparing yourself to make luck go your way?
I think we have discussed the basic points of Luck. I guarantee I will be returning to the topic of luck in future episodes, and diving deeper into these ideas and real-world observations and how they are pertinent within our lives, businesses, and organizations today.
Links to all the quoted resources are in the show notes and in the transcript on my website, Eddiekillian.com
Join me next Tuesday as we continue to travel the path of what is difficult, perilous, and uncertain as we explore introducing A New Order of Things.
I am your host, Eddie Killian. And this concludes lucky Episode 13.
References
Andreessen, M. (2007, August 14). Luck and the Entrepreneur: The Four Kinds of Luck. Retrieved from https://pmarchive.com/: https://pmarchive.com/luck_and_the_entrepreneur.html
Aurelius, M. (2003). Meditations. New York: Modern Library.
Branson, R. (2014). The Virgin Way: Everything I Know about Leadership. London: Portfolio.
Deutsch, D. (2011). The Beginning of Infinity. New York: Viking.
Holiday, R. (2019, October 3). Daily Stoic Email Archives. Retrieved from The Daily Stoic: https://dailystoic.com/category/email-archives/
James H. Austin, M. (2003). Chase, Chance, and Creativity. London: The MIT Press.
Popper, K. (1983). The Aim of Science. New York: Routledge.
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile. New York: Random House.
Wiseman, R. (2003). The Luck Factor. London: Talk Books. Retrieved from http://www.luckfactor.co.uk
Eddie Killian 