How to Get Lucky (Harriman Classics): 13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life’s good breaks - by Max Gunther
Date read: 2022-06-13How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
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Published in 1986, the book focuses on the importance that luck - both good & bad - plays in your life and how to create the environment and attitude to produce more luck for yourself.
Contents:
- TECHNIQUE #1: MAKING THE LUCK/PLANNING DISTINCTION
- TECHNIQUE #2: FINDING THE FAST FLOW
- TECHNIQUE #3: RISK SPOONING
- TECHNIQUE #4: RUN CUTTING
- TECHNIQUE #5: LUCK SELECTION
- TECHINQUE #6: THE ZIGZAG PATH
- TECHINQUE #7: CONSTRUCTIVE SUPERNATURALISM
- TECHINQUE #8: WORST-CASE ANALYSIS
- TECHINQUE #9: THE CLOSED MOUTH
- TECHINQUE #10: RECOGNIZING A NONLESSON
- TECHINQUE #11: ACCEPTING AN UNFAIR UNIVERSE
- TECHINQUE #12: THE JUGGLING ACT
- TECHINQUE #13: DESTINY PAIRING
My Notes
Luck is one of the most important elements in men’s and women’s lives. Indeed, in many lives it is unequivocally the most important. Yet, strangely, people don’t talk about it much. In fact, most people are like William Hoffman, the gambler, and his father, the coach: They are reluctant to acknowledge luck’s huge influence.
If you want to be a winner, you must stay keenly aware of the role luck plays in your life. When a desired outcome is brought about by luck, you must acknowledge that fact. Don’t try to tell yourself the outcome came about because you were smart. Never confuse luck with planning. If you do that, you all but guarantee that your luck, in the long run, will be bad.
But when you clearly see how luck affects a given situation, then you become strongly aware that the situation is bound to change. It can change radically, rapidly, without warning, in unpredictable ways. You cannot know what the change will be or when it will happen, but you can be perfectly sure it will happen sooner or later. The one thing you cannot expect is the very thing the loser does expect: continuity, a repetition of yesterday’s events.
The lucky approach is to say to yourself, “Okay I’m going to get into this risky situation-this roulette game, this mutual fund investment. But I am not operating under the delusion that planning will make it turn out my way. I see luck looming large in it, so I will be careful not to let myself grow too confident and relaxed. I will expect rapid change. I won’t make large, irrevocable commitments. I’ll stay poised to bail out the minute I see a change I don’t like.”
Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
“If you’re a hermit, nothing ever happens in your life,” he said. “If you’re the opposite of a hermit, things happen.”
“We can’t all be the life of the party. Some of us are quieter than others. But we can all go around with a look and attitude that says we want to be friendly. We can stay active. The worst thing you can do is withdraw from the network of friendships and acquaintanceships at home and at work. If you aren’t in the network, nobody is ever going to steer anything your way.”
To be singled out as a lucky target, you must make something of yourself known to those who are your primary links in the network. These can still be what we’ve called “weak” links, but they must be at least strong enough so that people know who you are, what work you do, what your interests are, what kinds of rewards you look for in life. It is necessary for them to know what you would consider a lucky break.
Make contact with people. Get involved. Don’t be a sideliner, watching events flow past. Plunge into the events yourself.
Lucky people characteristically avoid both extremes. They cultivate the technique of taking risks in carefully measured spoonfuls.
Remember our definition of luck: events that influence your life but are not of your making. To secure the best chance that such events will happen to you, you have to invite them to happen; in other words, stick your neck out. You cannot control the kind of luck that will come your way. It may be good luck or bad.
It is essential to study risk-reward ratios. When a given risk is small and a potential reward large, you might as well take the risk and so position yourself to become a winner.
Always assume a given run will be short. You will virtually always be right. The law of averages is heavily on your side.
The simplest way to illustrate this is to calculate the mathematics of probability in tossing a coin. If you toss it 1,024 times, the odds are there will be one long run in which heads comes up nine times in a row. But there will be thirty-two short runs in which heads comes up four times in a row. Which is the way to bet? On the short runs, of course.
We hear more about big wins than about the vastly more common little wins. This can delude us into thinking the big wins are more attainable than they really are. We think: “Well, if all these stories are true, maybe there’s a big win waiting out there for me.”
One thing you can know, however, is that short runs are very much more common than long ones. The sensible thing to do is ride the run until you have a good but not enormous gain, avoid greed, and get out early.
The lucky reaction is to wait a short time and see if the problems can be fixed or will go away, and then, if the answer is no, bail out. Cut losses short. This is what lucky people habitually do. To put it another way, they have the ability to select their own luck. Hit with bad luck, they discard it, freeing themselves to seek better luck in another venture.
Lucky people, as a breed, are able to live with the knowledge that some decisions will turn out wrong. This is part of their general habit of accepting risk. “You take risks going in and you take risks getting out,” Bernard Baruch once said. “If you were to insist on 100% certainty, you would not be able to make any moves at all.” So spoke an extremely lucky man.
It turns out that lucky men and women, on the whole are not straight-line strugglers. They not only permit themselves to be distracted, they invite distraction. Their lives are not straight lines but zigzags.
The lucky, alert to the luck/ planning distinction, are aware that life is always going to be a turbulent sea of opportunities drifting randomly past in all directions. If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything.
A plan can be used as a kind of guide into the future but should never be allowed to harden into a law. If something better comes along, you should be ready to abandon your old plan immediately and without regret.
As a breed, lucky people tend to be supernaturalists. Some are devoutly religious, while others harbor the most peculiar superstitions.
So find yourself a supernatural guidance system. It can be serious or humorous, a profoundly held belief or a game. None of that matters. Nor does it matter whether the system, in terms of its pronouncements about itself, is “true” or is pure poppycock. As long as it isn’t malevolent or occultic, all that matters is that you hold it and can use it to help you make choices and take risks.
“I know this situation can go wrong. Now I’ve got to ask how it can go wrong. What is the worst possible outcome? Or if there are two or more ‘worst’ outcomes, what are they? How can it go wrongest? And if the worst does happen, what will I do to save myself?”
The trouble with too much talk is that it can constrict that valuable freedom and flexibility. Talk can tie you up, lock you into positions that seem right today but may be wrong tomorrow.
The lesson of this Ninth Technique is that the luckiest people guard against unnecessary talk. They are particularly careful when talking of subjects that have great personal importance to them. They reveal no more of their thinking than they have to. They don’t lock themselves into positions where there is no good reason to do so.
When outcomes are brought about by random events that are not under anybody’s control–events that we would define collectively as luck–then you must be very careful in determining what lessons may be drawn from them. The habit of deriving false lessons from life’s random happenings is a trait of the unlucky.
Nonlessons often grow out of unwarranted generalizations. A certain kind of event happens a few times in association with a certain kind of person, and you make a sweeping generalization to include all people of that kind.
Ills do befall the righteous and conversely the wicked are often allowed to live happily ever after.
The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.
Bad luck is hard enough to take when you recognize it as bad luck. When you blame yourself for it, it can destroy you.
If you lose your job because of events that are not of your making, the unhappy episode may knock you down but needn’t knock you out. It needn’t, that is, as long as you see clearly that what has happened to you is only a case of bad luck. But if you automatically assume that every bad thing that happens to you is in some way your own fault, then bad luck will almost always become worst luck.
Look around at human life and accept it the way it comes: disorderly and unfair. Don’t shun religion if it appeals to you. Shun only the ancient belief that God plans and directs every event in your life.
In real life, people don’t get what they deserve. They get what they get.
Lucky people always seem to have many ventures going on at the same time. Even at the height of success in a major venture such as a career, the lucky man or woman will usually have secondary ventures going or in preparation or under study–sometimes in bewildering variety. This affords protection in case the major venture runs into bad luck–which can happen unexpectedly at any time, as no lucky person ever forgets. If Venture A turns sour or simply turns stagnant and unexciting, maybe Venture B or C will burst in to flames in some unexpected way.
The unlucky person knows exactly what form of luck he is seeking. If he does get lucky, the good luck will come in one shape only: a new job. Charles Darrow, by contrast, didn’t know just what he was hoping for. All he knew was that the more ventures he got himself into, the better were the odds that some kind of lucky break would come his way.
The best way to boost your chances of meeting the person who will change your luck is to practice the Second Technique: Put yourself out in the fast flow.
That is the way it is with destiny pairs. If your potential partner walks into your life–a person with whom you feel a quick, strong and positive reaction–don’t let that person simply walk back out. At least keep the newborn relationship alive while you assess it and see where it might go for such a chance might not come around again.
For it doesn’t usually require a drastic change in anybody’s life to change his or her luck. Sometimes, all that is required is application of a single technique that was previously being ignored.
One good way to get started on luck improvement is to ask yourself which technique has been most notably lacking in your approach to life. If you consider yourself less lucky that you would like to be–which is presumably why you have been reading this book–then spend some time analyzing your life. What have you failed to do or not done right?
A good exercise that you can prescribe for yourself over the coming year–it’s not only useful but is also enjoyable–is to read or reread some of the world’s great novels and plays with the thirteen techniques in mind. Pay special attention to stories with unlucky outcomes. What technique or techniques could have produced a lucky outcome instead?