Most people think coincidences are lucky events in and of themselves. That people that have several coincidence that all contribute towards success are "lucky". The idea that luck is a skill seems contrary to logic for many who have defined luck as "positive, random chance encounters" and skill as "an ability to do or produce something effectively". However, one function that physics teaches is that nothing is random, everything is cause and effect. So realistically, there isn't really "luck" as most define it.
Instead what people consider "luck" is really nothing more than events that seem out of control to anyone watching that actually are resulting because of specific causes. The cause may be unknown to most. In fact even to the consistently "lucky", they may not know what specifically is contributing towards their "luck". However, if one develops a skill in producing meaningful coincidences, they are in fact developed in the skill of what most would call "luck".
Of course no one has the power to influence a coinflip or dice roll with regular accuracy. Well, within reason.
Perhaps if an individual is allowed to roll a dice on their own and they spend an enormous amount of work learning and running calculations of physics and running simulations using some physics based engine and determining the exact arm motion and amount of force and angle conducive to a specific result from a specific starting point, and then practicing for 10,000 hours until muscle memory takes over and one can influence the odds of the dice roll enough to gain an edge. But outside of perhaps an insane method that may not even work unless you are able to provide perfectly consistent conditions, no one can use their mind to influence a dice roll of manifest a "lucky roll" more often than the odds dictate indefinitely.
But not everything in life should be looked at as a dice roll. Even a dice roll has cause and effect relationship, but the reason it functions as if it is random is because it's sensitive to very minor changes. This is not randomness, but chaos. The weather was once thought to be random, until it was found to be chaotic by Edward Lorentz who modeled movements on a computer. There are specific causes and effects, it's just that in chaos, a small change in the system can cause a massive change to the result. It's hard to quantify all of them, or to predict accurately what will happen 100% of the time, so instead the weatherman will do their best to determine a range of outcomes and an approximate probability of the event. This may not be useful in a single prediction, but if you could for example determine when there's a 20% chance of a single dice roll landing on 4, you have a strong meaningful edge that can produce profits over time if the upside vs the risk is large enough.
Even when life is a dice roll, the person will produce more positive outcome if they can manage to deal with or manage more negative outcomes and only take the risks where the rewards outweigh the risk, or better yet, the skill gained plus the reward is more than the risk and managed appropriately.
One way of obtaining "luck" more often has a really simple formula of taking more chances at the lowest risk possible relative to the reward often enough while managing the downside correctly to obtain a high enough reward to offset the risks over time. It's simply to increase the volume and only "throw the dice" when the odds are in your favor or the reward is so disproportional to the risk that the expected value is positive.
If you have a 10% chance of success, but that success pays out 20 times the risk, it's a good outcome, provided you don't risk 100% of your capital or even 10% of your capital. In fact you should probably only put about 1% at risk or less, but up to 5.5% would still be worth taking if you could withstand failure and continue a very large number of times over your life.
There's 5 elements to success: risk, reward, odds, management and knowledge/experience (the intangible value you get out of it). Managing all of these and making good decisions is one way to be lucky. If you manage your risk, you will survive longer then most so you are in a position to get lucky while others take far too much risk and lose and get discouraged or wiped out so that after a few losses their next win is on such a small amount of capital that it doesn't even get them back to even. I prefer risking far less so that experience can be accumulated over time, and larger edges can be gained over time.
Another way of obtaining "luck" more often is to work in a way where every "failure" allows you to get better at something that you can apply towards the next attempt. In other words, improving your rate of success per attempt over time. That may mean not necessarily chasing the most obvious path. It may be choosing the path that will develop technique that you can use later. People usually don't judge you by your failures that are virtually unrecorded, and life is a mechanism powered by failure, particularly in capitalistic societies.
Every business eventually fails given enough time. Even General Electric and General Motors have not failed yet, but they have had individual failures. Also, given enough time they will be acquired ending their existence, or they will split up into two companies and one of the derivatives will fail. Given 10,000 years the companies that acquire them or all of the companies they split into will eventually probably all fail. But does that mean the economy has to eventually end? No! All of the eventual failures in the meantime will provide experiences and knowledge and help others to survive or make life better in some way, and generate transactions that keep the economy going as a result. Experiences and knowledge will be applied to the next business or career for in many cases dozens, hundreds, thousands of individuals or more.
Those failures will provide the means for others to succeed. And the next time the entrepreneur exits the existing business to start something else, he will probably do a little bit better at certain aspects, or try something different and learn from the two experiences why one was more successful.
Failure to many is seen as an end point. If you treat failure as an end point, you will have much worse luck than someone who treats it as a starting point or rest stop before the next opportunity.
In nature, some of the most destructive and violent fires can actually fertilize the soil with ash that actually makes it easier to grow. Many farmers used to intentionally burn down crops and forest in what's known as the "slash and burn" method. The resulting layer of ash provides the newly-cleared land with a nutrient-rich layer to help fertilize crops. This would to many seem counter productive, but although there may be more modern methods that are used and work just as well or better, the slash and burn method is still the best option to many parts of the world.
So if in many instances the act of creation comes from the starting point of a failure, you can actually choose a method or journey towards success that leverages those failures and even plans for them.
One of the most common methods of failure en route to success and "luck" is split testing.
Split testing basically plants seeds of success with the intention of burning that which grows the slowest to continue with the metaphor. For example, if you create the same exact page and change only one word in the headline, you are going to intentionally destroy the worst performer in order to focus more of your resources on the one that performs better. You may measure performance by dollars generated or dollars generated per viewer if you are running a sales page, and you try to create as fair and equal environment possible for each one to succeed.
You also may simultaneously test 10 other entirely unique headlines and then test 10 unique key words within that headline, and destroy all but the best performing. Although you may constantly be adding new ideas, essentially you are trying to eliminate every one that doesn't work well.
Meanwhile you also may test 10 other sales page in this exact same way. You also will repeat with 10 different products. You eliminate all which don't earn you the most money per dollar spent or perhaps the most per visitor if you can get very good at find creative low cost ways to get new visitors and referrals. Or you may instead focus on the pages and methods that generate the most visitors if you are very good at converting even the lowest quality of visitor to a long term customer that buys a high end product many times over the course of his or her life. This is more "relationship building" and building a low cost membership site with several upsells over the course of your business relationship. Either way, you have a clear plan or system of how you are going to take all these failures, and eliminate them in favor of putting the most amount of your resources (time and money) into the best performing.
People see the one succeeds and says "He was so lucky. He caught the right product at the right time and found the exact right market". What they may not see is everything else you did that they would have called "unlucky".
Here's an example:10 products with 10 sales pages and testing 10 headlines per sales page. 1 succeeds, the rest are essentially failures that you sell off to someone else to try to recuperate some of your costs.
You're picking the least bad option of all of them, and focusing your resources on that.
Then you will eventually restart the process testing perhaps more sales pages and headlines and details to mirror as much of the successful things as possible, plus you also will look to test other new products looking to find more failures to eliminate. Meanwhile, you hopefully are studying a lot including self study and learning a lot from each one of your failures. If done correctly, the small scale testing will be very small relative to the successes.
You may start with 1 sales page and 1 headline and 1 product, and then you might test 9 different products over months of time. You then will add to the process. You could potentially lose money in 999 of these, or at least find a market that is unsustainable (only makes money for a little while before you have to move on). But if you can find one that succeeds that you can continue to invest in, you can have enormous success if you do it right.
Let's say for example it takes about $1 worth of time or money for each combination of product, sales page and headline. Heck, let's say it costs $100 each for a total of $100,000. If the one that succeeds generates $300, You have lost a lot of money. However, if next time rather than putting in 1% of your money allocated towards finding new ideas, you then put 90% of your money into it and are able to duplicate the results, you can have enormous profits.
For example, let's say you apply 10% of your money towards finding new ideas. In other words, lets say you have $1,000,000. You "waste" 100,000 on "bad ideas. But you have a system. Once you find your good idea you then invest say $100,000 on that specific idea to make sure it can continue to generate income. You find it can, only at a slightly less rate because of the law of diminishing returns. After all of this, you put in $200,100 and perhaps you get $200,300 back. A lot of volatility for not much gain. However, since it worked, and you have $1,000,200 now. You may put ~20% of your wealth into the idea or ~200k. You may only get a 50% return this time. So you get your $200,000 back plus an additional 100k. You're up to 1.1M. You invest your 20% and you are up to 1.21M, then 20% again and it's 1.331M. You can repeat this, and decide whether or not you want lower risk. If you managed it differently at a much smaller scale, you might have started with 1,000 and now you have $1331. The point is you have an engine to generate wealth. In the meantime you repeat the process of looking for a better engine and constantly testing new things, scrapping everything that didn't generate the most positive response and focusing there.
The "cost" of failure is experiencing what didn't work. The benefit is finding out what didn't work and spending more time doing something else.
There are other ways to "plan" for luck than throwing a bunch of stuff to the wall to see what fits. My favorite story about luck and coincidence was told by Wayne Dyer here.
However, a combination of persistence, risk taking, risk management, positive belief, designed coincidences and timing along with other skills like negotiation and marketing to make you more visible and find more value and be more persuasive can literally create positive opportunities that wouldn't otherwise exist. People will say "you're lucky", but the truth will be you learned to develop the skills of luck.
How much more lucky can you be than you already are? Maybe you can be even more lucky than you think you can now.
