Components of luck

I have been thinking about luck.

Someone mentioned how they would have done luck differently as a D&D feat. My response was that I would handle luck in a variety of ways (more than one feat, more than just feats).

Someone once said luck is when opportunity meets action.

Random event of luck:
[01] occurs: it exists in a time and a space that can be acted upon; and is
[02] noticed: it is identified as a useful opportunity; and is
[03] categorized: it is known what general skillset would be needed; and is
[04] understood: it is within an available skillset to act upon; and is
[05] evaluated: it is scrutinized by the appropriate skillset; and is
[06] appraised: the risk/reward is given a guess on its outcome; and is
[07] feasible: the resources needed to act upon the event are available; and is
[08] acceptable: the risk/reward is seen as agreeable; and is
[09] successful: the event produces a positive outcome; and is
[10] successful to a high magnitude: the event has high positive outcome; and is
[11] ongoing: the event has repeatable or continuous ramifications (at least a flat bonus); and is
[12] compounding: the event results in compounding benefits (at least a percentage bonus)

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An example from my life:

[01] The housing bubble was a thing
[02] I saw that the housing bubble was a thing (I would go full get-off-my-lawn-old-man-cranky and yell at the commercials)
[03] I knew that I could have called bankers to help me figure it all out
[04] I knew that some bankers would have known how to profit from it
. . . here is when my luck dried up . . .
[05] Theoretically I could have found a banker to help me identify how to profit
[06] Theoretically I could have found a banker to help me figure out the risk/reward scenarios
[07] Hopefully I could have found one that would be able to structure the investment
[08] Hopefully we would be okay with the risk/reward scenarios
[09] I would have been successful
[10] I would have made a truckload of money
[11] I may have leaned more about how to do something similar in the future
[12] It would have compounded

Perhaps I could have been retired on my own privet island right now . . . one can dream.

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Originally Posted by darkrose50

I have been thinking about luck.

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But... many would argue that "luck" doesn't actually exist in the real world, and that what people call "luck" is just someone being savvy enough to notice and take advantage of opportunities that come up (which is basically your scenario)

In a fantasy game, there is magic and other things that don't exist in the real world. Luck is more enticing if it is a real thing in the fantasy world, rather than just a mechanized description of reality.

I see where you are coming from though.

For example, you can luckily be at the right place at the right time... and have a wonderful opportunity present itself because of that. But it takes the wisdom to see the opportunity and the gumption to act upon it, even if it seems risky.

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Originally Posted by Aliquid

But... many would argue that "luck" doesn't actually exist in the real world, and that what people call "luck" is just someone being savvy enough to notice and take advantage of opportunities that come up (which is basically your scenario)

I see where you are coming from though.

For example, you can luckily be at the right place at the right time... and have a wonderful opportunity present itself because of that. But it takes the wisdom to see the opportunity and the gumption to act upon it, even if it seems risky.

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Yes.

You cannot control a random encounter from presenting itself to you. In order for one to be able to take advantage of the random encounter, there needs to be the random encounter to begin with. So it very well may be the person who turns the random encounter into a positive situation, but the person does not control the triggering event presenting itself.

Two equal people, one with the encounter and one without the encounter, can end up living vastly different lives. I would call that luck.

My planned plans often seem to blow up in tremendous ways. I seem to do considerably better not planning, and I am not sure if that is good or bad. It would be nice to plan for something and have it work out for a change . . . just to see what it was like to see a plan unfold as intended. As it stands all of my best things are seemingly randomly rolled. Many/most/all of the good things in my life were not planned. Dating my wife, picking a career, picking stuff to invest in, winning a trip to the Bahamas . . . all results from random encounters.

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Originally Posted by Aliquid

In a fantasy game, there is magic and other things that don't exist in the real world. Luck is more enticing if it is a real thing in the fantasy world, rather than just a mechanized description of reality.

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Pretty much every character we ever play is better than us, and has more interesting things happen to them. I suppose they are pretty much mostly/always lucky in that way. I can see luck as something that triggers the event, but I can also see luck as being someone who had the event trigger. Sure someone winning the lottery may not win because they are lucky, but winning the lottery makes them lucky as they benefit from something random.

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Originally Posted by darkrose50

My planned plans often seem to blow up in tremendous ways. I seem to do considerably better not planning, and I am not sure if that is good or bad.

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Mostly that suggests you're not good at planning. It's a skill like any other, it takes thought or training and practise to improve it.

I don't like planning, and I avoid it most of the time, but I have to acknowledge that when I do plan - at least a little - I can earn myself significantly better outcomes than by just making it up as I go along.

I would say that "luck" covers quite a range of effects. Sheer random luck is certainly a thing - ask any lottery winner. A lot of times, what we call lucky is mostly about, as you say, spotting an opportunity and acting appropriately - but even then there's a significant portion of the outcome that you can't predict or control, so there's still a lot of randomness in the result.

I must be (or perhaps I was) horrible at planning.

I keep very detailed notes. I excel at creating procedures, and creating efficiency. Efficiency is an ethical standard of mine (seriously, inefficiency offends me).

I also was not diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome until 10-years ago or so . . . so that changed things considerably as it gave me a much better understanding of myself.

I do not interview well AT ALL.

I got one job because my friend played paintball with the interviewer. I ended up moving up in the company and ended up as a technician in engineering. This was a dream job. I could do 1.6 of a day's work in like 30-90-minutes, and then was told to not work anymore. I argued on the interwebs all day long.

I got another job (the one I have now) because my wife found it online, they initially hire anyone who passes the test (in massive numbers for open/annual enrollment), and then keep the high performers. I ended up doing well enough to get hired, won a trip to the Bahamas and somehow managed to not get fired after a pair of managers tried to fire me ~3-times . . . ~4-times (?) . . . so many times . . . they ended up getting fired and/or leaving the company.

"...the way in which every difficulty is foreseen, and precautions taken for meeting or avoiding it. Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

-Roald Amundsen

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

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Originally Posted by danzibr

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

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We all hear the work hard and get far in life speeches. My experience has been the absolute opposite. Of all the jobs that I have had, the jobs that require the least amount of work earn the most amount of money.

The world is full of hardworking low-paying jobs. When someone with a white-collar job says that they work hard, they are not lying, but they likely do not have experience working a blue-collar job. A lawyer and a fisherman get tired in much different ways. Different work, different type of tiring.

The commute home is the most tiring thing about my job.

You could always become a teacher. I hear they're millionaires in the making and the work can't be that hard. They get the summers off.

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Originally Posted by Razade

You could always become a teacher. I hear they're millionaires in the making and the work can't be that hard. They get the summers off.

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It is hard work. The summers off is a nice bonus. Come to think of it the summers off might be one reason as to why it attracts a disproportionate representation of the upper-middle-class and upper-class, as it affords ample travel and vacation time.

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Originally Posted by darkrose50

It is hard work. The summers off is a nice bonus.

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If by "bonus," you mean "mandatory three-month period where you don't get paid, and if you want a steady paycheck throughout the year you can request that they lower the amount for the nine months you do get paid so they can give it to you over the summer months. Or just get a second job during the summer. And by 'second,' we also mean 'and maybe third.'"

In which case, I would contest the "nice" part.

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Originally Posted by Peelee

If by "bonus," you mean "mandatory three-month period where you don't get paid, and if you want a steady paycheck throughout the year you can request that they lower the amount for the nine months you do get paid so they can give it to you over the summer months. Or just get a second job during the summer. And by 'second,' we also mean 'and maybe third.'"

In which case, I would contest the "nice" part.

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Most (all?) of the teachers I know get paid for the months where they do not work.

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Originally Posted by darkrose50

Most (all?) of the teachers I know get paid for the months where they do not work.

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Most (all?) of the teacher I know do as well, because they have their normal pay deducted every other month so that they can get that pay over the summer months when they are not working, and thus not getting paid otherwise.

If you live in a place where the school system will pay teachers for three months vacation without that pay coming out of the front end, well, I think that's fantastic and more power to those teachers.

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Originally Posted by danzibr

The harder I work, the luckier I get.

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Must be nice.

The harder I work the more physical pain I feel, and the less hard I work the luckier I feel.

Of all the professions you're not allowed to criticise, teachers complain the most. Some of those complaints are valid, but many just show a lack of perspective.

Some districts are garbage; but by and large, you're never going to see some dearth of people wanting to get into the job to the scale you're seeing with a lot of police departments these days (also a good-paying job with great benefits). Most places you go, teachers are doing better than most.

What is happening with teachers has little to do with pay and benefits; and more to do with burnout from ****ty parents expecting the schools and teachers to raise their kids for them.

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Originally Posted by Crow

Of all the professions you're not allowed to criticise, teachers complain the most. Some of those complaints are valid, but many just show a lack of perspective.

Some districts are garbage; but by and large, you're never going to see some dearth of people wanting to get into the job to the scale you're seeing with a lot of police departments these days (also a good-paying job with great benefits). Most places you go, teachers are doing better than most.

What is happening with teachers has little to do with pay and benefits; and more to do with burnout from ****ty parents expecting the schools and teachers to raise their kids for them.

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We have a lot of teachers compared to the other professions. Just the volume of the number of teachers we need is mind-boggling. They do get the shaft often. In my wife's school they make them change rooms early and often for the "free" cleaning service that they get out of this practice. To add insult to injury sometimes they make them do this more than once between and during school-years. I would want to be paid for moving my desk all the time at work . . . much less for an entire classroom.

Teachers keep getting new responsibilities. It just keeps on piling up year-after-year.

Teachers burn-out evidently at an average rate of 5-years, and 3-years for special education.

I remember reading about a study of luck once. They had a bunch of people rate how lucky they tended to be, and then had each person count how many pictures were in a section of newspaper. The people who said they were lucky finished much faster than the rest - they noticed that the second page of the newspaper contained a headline, or maybe it was a caption, stating how many pictures there were.

The opportunity to cut the count short was there for all of them, but the "lucky" people were much more likely to notice and use it.