Chance favours the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur
Luck is often both underrated and overrated.
It’s underrated because luck plays a HUGE difference between success and failure, and you almost always need a string of lucky events to be successful in life or achieve something great. It’s common to hear of multiple strokes of luck for the top 0.1% of people to get to where they are. Hard work, grit, and intelligence is not enough–you need luck.
It’s also overrated because people think too highly of the rarity of its occurrence and that it happens without doing anything, and that it happens only to some people.
From a statistical point of view, Littlewood’s law of miracles states that in the course of any normal person’s life, miracles happen at the rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about 30,000 per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month.
What can you do to be “luckier”? It’s a game of probability. Increase your chances of “bumping” into luck. Grow your network, grow your skills, grow your knowledge, so when a miracle happens, you know how to recognise it and take advantage of it. When you increase your surface area of possibilities, you increase your chance of catching good luck, simply through the laws of probability. That’s why it’s so important to get out of your comfort zone, because only then can the surface area increase.