How To Scientifcally Generate Luck For Yourself – 4 Types of Luck Based On Neuroscience

Felix Felicia, The Lucky Potion, from Harry Potter

“Damn, he’s got lucky with that deal.“

“Wish I could catch a break like her, then I’ll finally get the hike I know I deserve”

“What a lucky chap, if only I had the same luck he does of meeting exactly the right people”

If, like me, these thoughts come to you when and you wonder why the universe sends truckloads of luck to everyone but you, it’s time we had real conversation about luck.

It’s trite now to say that its important to be lucky. It’s almost impolite now to not acknowledge the role of luck in your achievement every time you talk about them in public or private. Especially in places like India where excessive humility is a virtue, its a sign of arrogance if you don’t have at least one ode to good old fortune.

And important it is. Annie Duke puts it brilliantly in her book, Thinking In Bets: Most outcomes are a combination of skill, luck, and unknown information.

When I think of luck, I used to associate it to a sense of haplessness it it. I grew up believing that luck is something that happens to me if, well, if I’m lucky. I can either choose to passively accept what luck throws at me or actively accept it and take action on it, but that’s the extent of discretion I have.

If you’ve had a conventional education and upbringing like me, then chances are you believe the same notion as well.

Everything changed one fine day when I lucked upon an article that spoke about some research into luck.

Research into luck? That seemed almost contradictory. A scientific approach to something that’s not unscientific – what’s happening?

Turns out, In 1978, neurologist Dr. James Austin published a book entitled Chase, Chance, & Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty.

And yes, there is a portion of luck that’s the unknowable uncontrollable force of nature that we commonly associate with it – but that’s just one category out of 4 categories of luck.

TLDR

Blind Luck is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it.

Luck form Motion arises from increasing your surface area of luck through motion, actions, energy. It favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore.

Luck from Awareness is about spotting luck that others can’t. It favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations. It depends upon how good you are at synthesis.

Luck from Uniqueness. favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors.

Think of the four categories of luck like a funnel – Blind Luck, at the top of the funnel, applies to everyone, whereas Luck from Uniqueness applies to you and a handful of people like you.

But first, what is luck?

Here’s how Dr James describes it –

“Chance… something fortuitous that happens unpredictably without discernable human intention”

Or, in more normal language, chance (luck) is an event that happens to you without anyone intending for it to happen.

So, what’s the point of talking about it if there’s no human intention?

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 unforseeable. 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 principles involved affect everyone.

Hold up: Is this some random philosophical retrofitting of an explanation just because we want to impose some form of pattern to random things? Is it just for the sake of feeling like we’re in control?

Here’s where it helps that a neurologist is talking about it.

The four kinds of chance each have a different kind of motor exploratory activity and a different kind of sensory receptivity. The four varieties of chance also involve distinctive personality traits and differ in the way one particular individual influences them.

He proposed that there are 4 types of luck:

(1) Blind Luck (Chance 1)

This is the type of luck that’s unknowable, uncontrollable, unforseeable. It is pure blind luck that comes with no effort on our part. A meteorite hitting only you from 8 billion humans? Check. You find a bag of money while on a walk in a forest? Check. A delay in your schedule prevented you from using a bus that broke down? Check check check.

(2) Luck from Motion (Chance 2)

In Chance 2, something else has been added – _motion_. You essentially increase your surface area to luck because of your motion and actions.

Years ago, when I was rushing around in the laboratory conducting medical research, 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, filter best when in constant up-and-down, side-to-side movement…Un_luck runs out if you keep stirring up things so that random elements can combine, by virtue of you and their inherent affinities.

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.”

This is the type of luck that arises when things are in collision. You only meet the love of your life when he happens to be in the same book store that you’ve visited and you initiate a conversations with him. You only get that amazing job when you posted those achievements on LinkedIn and somebody from that company saw your post. You only discovered the a new approach to luck because you went to Medium because you wanted to learn something (or you were bored)

This type of luck matters because it tells us that the more we are in motion, doing broadly productive things, the more lucky we get. – as simple as that. Conversely, if you’re in an environment where you aren’t able to exercise motion, then the chances of you getting lucky from motion are much lower – if you live in the middle of nowhere, chances are that you aren’t going to find new friends every week.

(3) Luck from Awareness

Luck from Awareness happens to those who have a heightened awareness to luck. It’s when you have a special ability to spot opportunities – that are not evident to many people – when they collide with your surface area of luck (from Chance 1 or from Chance 2). These are opportunities that are not dressed in the typical garbs of luck with a neon sign pointing to it saying. “GET LUCKY” (dingy and shady streets with shady people come to mind).

You are able to spot these opportunities because of some combination of your deep knowledge, skill or experience in a domain coupled with a heightened sense of observation that results in you being more aware. Only people who have these things are able to leverage this type of luck. You learn to “Spot Luck” from a distance that’s lost on others.

Now, as we move on to Chance III, we see blind luck, but it tiptoes in softly, 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.

Chance III involves 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] occured in 1928, when Sir Alexander Fleming’s mind instantly fused at least five elements into a conceptually unified 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!

(4) Luck from Uniqueness (Chance 4)

Luck From Uniqueness happens to you because of who you are. It’s the hardest, but the most unbeatable type of luck.

Chance IV favors the individualized action. This is the fourth element in good luck – an active, but unintentional, subtle individualized prompting of it.

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.

Okay, so how do we leverage Chance 4?

You have to look carefully to find Chance IV for three reasons.

1. It operates directly, it unfolds in an elliptical, unorthodox manner.

2. It often works indirectly.

3. 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.

Essentially, Luck from Uniqueness happens not because of what you do, but who you are. This can be a combination of your interests – for example, imagine if someone specially needed a trained physicist who is an expert deep sea diver, and were ready to pay good money for it. There are probably a handful of people like this around the world. Chances are that if you’re that physicist, you’re going to make good money from them. – not because you solicited the opportunity but because it came to you.

A subtler example – imagine if you’re very interested and good in cloud computing, fundamental physics, and building models. Chances are that as Quantum Computing commercialises further, you will be one of the handful of people in the world who can help companies build the equivalent of AWS for cloud computation – and will be rewarded handsomely from it.

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.

There are easily identifiable steps you can take to leverage the three types of non-Blind Luck. The more things you do in line with these categories, the luckier you will become compared to someone who isn’t taking these steps. It’s a virtuous cycle – the more lucky you are, the luckier you get with time.