How to Get Lucky Book Review
How to Get Lucky by Max Gunther is an interesting read on the topic of Luck that plays such a crucial role in all aspects of life.
Having enjoyed reading the author’s The Zürich Axioms and having written an article on the meaning of luck, I was looking at other books written by him and was intrigued by the title and so decided to buy it.
In the author’s words:
The Luck Factor, looked at why some people might be luckier than others and this follow-on title suggests possible steps you might attempt to potentially improve your luck.
The book outlines thirteen techniques to become lucky. Each of which is liberally explained with multiple examples. While I don’t necessarily agree with everything written I found some like the second technique very relevant.
If you want to explore a perspective on Luck, then I recommend you give this book a try.
How to Get Lucky Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
The Supreme Insult
He failed because he tried to deny the role of luck in his life.
It isn’t enough just to be good. You’ve got to be lucky, too.
Good luck is the essential basic component of success.
Luck is being in the right place at the right time. Knowing somebody who knew somebody.
Being good simply is not enough.
No matter how carefully you design your life, you cannot know how that design will be changed by the working of random events.
Luck is the supreme insult to human reason. You can’t ignore it, yet you can’t plan for it.
You cannot control your luck in a precise way.
You can bring about a substantial and even startling improvement in the quality of your luck.
The luck-changing precepts you are about to study – the thirteen techniques of lucky positioning – are not just wisps of gassy theory. They were not invented by a bearded shrink sitting in his study, puffing on his pipe. Instead, they are derived from direct observations of men’s and women’s lives.
The Factor Nobody Talks About
Luck (noun): Events that influence your life but are not of your making.
If you believe you are in perfect control of your life, you are kidding yourself. You owe your very existence to a chancy event that happened before you were born.
Why do people deny the role of luck? For one thing, we hate to think we are at the mercy of random happenings.
Life seems safer when I can say to myself, “The future will happen as I plan it.” It won’t, of course. Deep inside, we all know it won’t.
Another reason why we prefer not to discuss luck’s role is that it diminishes us and steals our dignity.
“Character is destiny,” Heraclitus wrote some twenty-five centuries ago.
We are culturally conditioned to deny the role of luck.
Students are taught that the character flaw is a necessary ingredient of tragedy, Professor Rose wrote in The New York Times: “If the hero or heroine didn’t have a flaw, it wouldn’t be tragic because it wouldn’t ‘mean’ anything. It would just be bad luck.”
Luck isn’t “meaningful” enough. We yearn for life to have meaning. Acknowledging luck’s role takes half the meaning out of it.
The first step toward improving your luck is to acknowledge that it exists.
Lucky people characteristically organize their lives in such a way that they are in position to experience good luck and to avoid bad luck.
The First Technique: Making the Luck/Planning Distinction
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.
“Strain” meaning the demand placed on gambling capital while one is waiting for a win.
The system works when you are lucky.
When you enjoy a winning streak, you are safe as long as you see clearly what part of it was brought about by planning and what part by luck.
Believing himself to be winning because of his superior intellect, he speculates less and less cautiously.
Ignoring the role of luck is a recipe for bad luck.
The one thing you cannot expect is the very thing the loser does expect: continuity, a repetition of yesterday’s events.
Planning may be more important than luck in much of what you do. The trick is to know what kind of situation you are in at any given time.
It is essential to arrive at some idea of this Luck:Planning ratio in the important ventures of your life.
The Second Technique: Finding the Fast Flow
Men and women find good luck by positioning themselves where events are flowing fastest.
The commandment of the Second Technique is: 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.”
People who get dead-ended are very often people who allow themselves to become isolated.
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.
Business world as in the movies, the big breaks flow through contacts between people. Not necessarily close friendships, just contracts.
Fate has given her a lucky break, but she has earned it. She has positioned herself for it.
The power of seemingly weak links between people is one of the less well understood phenomena of human society.
The “small-world phenomenon” – the often astonishing way in which people’s networks of weak links overlap.
Luck flows along linked chains of people until it hits targets, just as Dr Milgram’s document did. The flow very often begins with a friend-of-a-friend.
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.
Go where events flow fastest. Specifically what does that mean? It means, simply, make contact with people. Get involved. Don’t be a sideliner, watching events flow past. Plunge into the events yourself.
At work, counsels Eric Wachtel, go out of your way to make yourself known in your own company and outside it. Go to meetings, even boring ones.
In off-the-job life, be just as much of a meeter and joiner.
All that is necessary is that you meet a lot of people and let them know just who you are.
Consistently lucky people are nearly always to be found in the fast flow.
The Third Technique: Risk Spooning
There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take goofy risks; that is, risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. And the other is to take no risks at all.
Lucky people characteristically avoid both extremes. They cultivate the technique of taking risks in carefully measured spoonfuls.
Our education and social conditioning tend to push us into the plodder’s way of life.
The straight-line plodder, shunning risk, also avoids the possibility of lucky breaks. On the whole, plodders are unlucky.
Neither good nor bad luck strikes them to any notable degree. Their lives hardly change. Nothing happens.
Not even change will happen unless you take some kind of risk.
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.
if you want luck to come around and change your life, you must initially be willing to accept either good or bad luck. That is another way of saying you must take a risk.
Rockefeller was a man who stuck his neck out and invited luck to come and change his life.
“Work hard, spend wisely, invest safely, and let time do the rest.”
It diminishes us to admit that our greatest achievements resulted largely or even partly from good luck.
“Plan your work and work your plan.”
Watson’s most famous slogan was “Think.”
“Work, Think, and Plan.”
“I placed those bets because I enjoyed it,” she explained to a lottery official. “Even if I never won, I got my dollar’s worth of fun out of it.”
The act of taking this minor Saturday risk put her in position to win.
If you don’t bet, you are not in position to win.
The unwillingness to take risks is a characteristic of those unlucky people we call “born losers.”
All risks looked equally daunting to her. That is a recipe for poor positioning in the world of luck. 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.
Life is a muddle of fogbound choices.
The risk-shunning syndrome stems from excessive fear of getting hurt.
I have never met a gambler of either sex who wanted to lose. Never. I very much doubt that there is such a person.
Compulsive gamblers and speculators know their behavior is self-destructive without needing to be told so.
Learn the technique of risk spooning.
Become comfortable with the thought of yourself as a prudent risker.
If you insist on waiting for risk-free situations, you are probably doomed to wait.
Once you get used to risk, think about increasing the dosage.
Conquer your fear of risk.
Risk is a necessary ingredient of every successful life.
Risk puts you in position to win.
The Fourth Technique: Run Cutting
Always assume the run is going to be short. Never try to ride a run to its very peak. Don’t push your luck.
Short runs are very much more common than long ones.
Having signed on for a long run, you work yourself into a psychological state in which nothing else will do. You trap yourself into waiting for the long run, which, nine times out of ten, isn’t going to happen.
The Fifth Technique: Luck Selection
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.
The unlucky, by contrast, are always getting themselves stuck – sometimes for life – in bad relationships and losing money ventures.
The unlucky don’t have the knack of selecting luck. Incapable of discarding a bad hand, they can only sit and suffer while bad luck becomes worse luck.
One reason why luck selection is so difficult for most people is that it almost always involves the need to abandon part of an investment. The investment may be in the form of time, commitment, love, money, or something else.
Whatever it is, you leave some of it behind when you discard a bad hand.
Cut your loss and sell out immediately. Only by doing that can you free your money to seek better luck in another investment.
Instead of having his money out chasing better luck elsewhere, he has allowed it to get trapped, perhaps for years.
The inability to abandon part of an investment is one of the loser’s outstanding traits.
Why luck selection is difficult for most is that it often requires a painful confession: “I was wrong.”
The loser’s response is to seek excuses for not admitting the error.
There are degrees of difficulty in luck selection. Backtracking to correct a wrong choice of route is relatively easy for most.
Selling a bad investment is harder. Quitting a disappointing job may be still harder. Backing out of a futureless love relationship may be the hardest and most complicated of all such loss-cutting acts.
Since you cannot see the future, there is only one way to find out what luck you have in a given situation: enter the situation and see what happens.
Lucky people often seem to behave in a pessimistic way when dealing with runs and streaks of luck.
Pessimism seems to be involved in luck selection.
Pessimist can never get caught in a major crash. And second, he can never get his money stuck in a situation of long-term stagnation.
Pessimism as used here it doesn’t refer to a state of chronic gloom, a long face, or a habit of expecting only bad things to happen.
The kind of pessimism that characterizes the lucky is really a fairly cheery state.
Fifth Technique, it is the habit of avoiding unfounded optimism.
Unfounded optimism is dangerous.
The lucky approach is to insist on seeing such evidence.
Things usually are as bad as they seem.
Fifth technique is without doubt one of the hardest techniques to master, and for some it is unequivocally the hardest. It is hard because it requires a kind of pessimism, or unsentimental realism, that doesn’t come naturally to many. What makes it still harder is that there are times when, in retrospect, you wish you hadn’t applied it.
More often what starts to go wrong stays wrong – or goes wronger.
In a souring situation, with no compelling reason to think things will get better, you are always right to cut your loss and go.
Lucky people, as a breed, are able to live with the knowledge that some decisions will turn out wrong.
“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.”
The Sixth Technique: The Zigzag Path
It is a fundamental assumption of the Work Ethic that people ought to have goals and should struggle toward them in a straight line. … This is supposed to be the sure route to success.
Goal orientation, as they call it in Psychology 101, is undoubtedly a good thing in moderate doses. But the lives of the lucky seem to say you should be wary of overdoing it.
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.
This is what the unlucky typically do. They stick to preplanned life routes even when they are going nowhere or are actually plodding downhill to disaster.
Long-range plans aren’t actually harmful, but it is important not to take them seriously.
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.
This doesn’t mean you should make frequent changes just for the sake of change itself. It means only that if a piece of potential good luck drifts your way, you should not summarily reject it simply because it doesn’t fit some predesigned plan.
Never take long-range plans seriously. Use them for general guidance as long as they seem to be taking you where you want to go,
Don’t get stuck with them. Throw them in the trash heap as soon as something better comes along.
Never be afraid to zigzag. Avoid wailing yourself into a category.
You never know which direction your lucky breaks may come from. When they drift into reach, grab them.
The Seventh Technique: Constructive Supernaturalism
This technique is about religion and superstition.
What’s religion to me may be superstition to you, and vice versa.
We can lump religion and superstition together and refer to them by one neutral word: supernaturalism.
Supernaturalism is defined as any belief in an unseen spirit, force, or agency whose existence hasn’t been proved to everybody’s satisfaction.
You win a prize in a lottery. Why? Where did the good luck come from? What is its purpose? Why were you singled out to receive it?
Pragmatist motto: “I believe what I can see and touch.”
This good luck was not sent to me by any unseen spirit, force, or agency. It was simply a random event. Somebody had to win the prize, and the winner chanced to be me. My good fortune has no purpose; nor does it prove anything. It just happened.
Nearly all lucky people, it turns out, associate themselves in some way with some kind of religious/supernatural idea.
A supernatural belief, even a trivial and humorous one, helps people get lucky by helping them make otherwise impossible choices.
Life is full of situations in which you must choose among alternatives but lack any rational basis for choosing.
Whether the outcome is affected by God, the ‘stars’, or a lucky charm is irrelevant. What counts is that the supernatural belief has enabled the player to get into a potentially winning position.
Life presents us with many more important fork-in-the-road situations. … Yet the worst reaction of all is to do nothing.
A classic case of inadequate data. No amount of figuring is going to lead the baffled hero to a solution. No rational choice is possible. Yet the worst reaction is to stand there and do nothing, for that will bring certain execution.
Anything – even the ancient ritual of tossing a coin – would have been better than failing to make the choice.
Real life abounds with examples of similar dilemmas: frustrating situations in which we must make choices and take risks without nearly enough data.
So find yourself a supernatural guidance system. It can be serious or humorous, a profoundly held belief or a game. None of that matters.
In bridge as in life, your fate is influenced by events beyond your control,
The game’s outcome will also be influenced by what you do with the luck you are handed.
The Eighth Technique: Worst-Case Analysis
Optimism means expecting the best, but good luck involves knowing how you will handle the worst.
“This situation is only partly under my control. Good or bad luck – events not of my making – could make it ripen into something good or could make it go sour.”
She decided the situation was much like that of entering a lottery: The risk of losing was large, but the amount to be lost was small.
Professional gamblers win because they reject optimism. They apply the Fifth Technique: the trick of selecting luck, of abandoning any venture rapidly when it turns sour. And they apply the Eighth Technique: the trick of worst-case analysis.
If you analyze the differences between consistent winners and losers in that greatest of all gambling casinos, one difference stands out starkly: The losers are optimistic.
The Ninth Technique: The Closed Mouth
We cannot control the flow of these events nor predict what they will be. But we can know that they are going to occur. Time and again, we are going to be dealing with the unexpected.
The best strategy would seem to be one of maximum flexibility: keeping ourselves free to deal with those unknowable events in whatever ways seem appropriate at the time.
The trouble with too much talk is that it can constrict that valuable freedom and flexibility.
“I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence,” wrote Publilius Syrus,
Words can come back to haunt you. Silence almost never does.
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.
A wise old owl sat on an oak. The more he saw, the less he spoke. The less he spoke, the more he heard. Why can’t we be like that old bird?
One lesson of the Ninth Technique: You don’t have to have your mouth going all the time to establish a circle of good friends and a widespread acquaintanceship network.
You can make friends as easily by listening, really listening,
It is a central assumption of modern psychology that talk is the cure for all ills and the route to all private and public heavens.
People who “bottle up” their anger – in other words, control it – don’t come to any great harm.
People who habitually vent their anger, on the other hand, only get angrier. They get angrier largely because they continually stir up their environment.
Silence doesn’t only protect you from getting locked into unwanted positions, and it doesn’t only keep you from revealing facts and feelings you may not want known.
Since life is ruled by luck and you can never predict what actions you will need to take, it is best to say as little as possible about what you are doing and thinking.
“What earthly good is it going to do to discuss my private life and feelings with my kids?” one woman wrote. “To the extent that my divorce directly affects their lives, they’re entitled to hear from me. But as for why I got divorced, it’s none of their business.”
“These ‘frank’ and ‘open’ kinds of relationships are volatile,” he says. “They tend to blow up.”
You must have relationships, after all; you must take chances; you must talk to people. The message of the Ninth Technique is only that you avoid unnecessary talk about your problems, plans, and feelings. When there is no good reason to say something, say nothing.
The Tenth Technique: Recognizing a Nonlesson
There are experiences in life that seem to be lessons but aren’t. A noteworthy trait of the lucky is that they know what they can’t learn anything from.
The habit of deriving false lessons from life’s random happenings is a trait of the unlucky.
Nonlessons often grow out of unwarranted generalizations.
With nonlesson you have learned nothing except that bad luck happens. Taking that kind of false lesson seriously may or may not do you grave harm.
Another kind of nonlesson, just as common but less obvious, comes from the belief that history is going to repeat itself. People who hold this belief believe, as a corollary, that you can learn detailed lessons for the future by studying the past.
Henry Ford put it, “History is bunk.”
You can often predict what one individual will do, but only in rare circumstances can you predict what a lot of people will do.
Pure, random chance had made history repeat itself, or seem to.
There is an element of luck in this, as in all human phenomena.
The Eleventh Technique: Accepting an Unfair Universe
Bad luck is just – well, bad luck.
The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.
Millions of words of religious sophistry have been read from the world’s pulpits in answer to such questions.
God may be fair but isn’t as powerful as everybody has always thought. He either can’t or won’t control all the details of what happens to us. Our lives are filled with random events.
Don’t look for the hand of God in the event. God didn’t cause it. Nothing caused it. It just happened.
The universe isn’t fair and never has been in all the time men and women have been grappling with 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.
You should recognize chaos when you see it. Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly. That is the lesson of this Eleventh Technique.
Don’t shun religion if it appeals to you. Shun only the ancient belief that God plans and directs every event in your life.
Just as it is misleading to blame yourself for bad luck, you also delude yourself when you come to a belief that you “deserve” good luck. You may well deserve it, but whether you will get it is a matter of – well, luck.
In real life, people don’t get what they deserve. They get what they get.
Never go into a venture thinking it will come out right for you because you “deserve” it.
The universe has no interest in what you deserve.
Our sense of fairness is powerful. The universe, however, is not under human control.
Only when there are no clues at all or when clues of equal weight seem to point in opposite directions, should you trust your fate to any irrational decision-making process such as a notion about fairness.
“Never expect anything.”
The Twelfth Technique: The Juggling Act
The luckier are the busier.
The difference is that, with the lucky, down periods never last long and often end in surprising, unforeseen ways.
The unlucky person knows exactly what form of luck he is seeking.
The more ventures he got himself into, the better were the odds that some kind of lucky break would come his way.
The more activities you have going on, the greater is the likelihood that something good will happen.
That is the way luck operates. By its very nature, it isn’t amenable to prediction.
Twelfth Technique is closely allied with the Second: Fast-flow orientation; and the Sixth: the zigzag path.
The lucky life is indeed characterized by a degree of hustle and bustle that seems frantic at times especially to the chronically unlucky.
What counts is how you feel about being busy. If it feels good in the body, if it feels right, then for you it is right.
Sit down quietly and make a list of what your major worries are. It can be done mentally or in writing, as you prefer. Make no attempt to solve the problems. Simply acknowledge that they are there and stack them up in a pile, as it were.
The list by itself doesn’t get the jobs done, of course. What it does do is make you feel better. It gives you the sense of having gained control over a situation that was going haywire. In this more tranquil state, you can approach the indicated chores in a confident, orderly way.
Making a list of problems and worries produces the same state of calm, the feeling of control.
Make a list of worries whenever your life seems to get too busy and you feel the beginnings of panic.
Making a list restores order.
If you seek good luck, it is far better to be too busy than not busy enough.
The Thirteenth Technique: Destiny Pairing
Only a person who alters your luck over a long term may be called a destiny partner.
In most, however, accident-proneness is a form of bad luck resulting from ordinary carelessness.
Getting Lucky: Putting the Thirteen Techniques Together
Life is disorderly and cannot be lived successfully according to a plan.
Human life being what it is, perfection is all but impossible.
If an amount to be placed at risk is that trivial, you might as well go ahead and risk
Lucky? Of course. But before he could enjoy the luck, he had to take the risk.
If you have been keeping yourself hidden and then suddenly thrust yourself into the fast flow, your life can explode with serendipitous events.
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?
Luck happens whether we invite it to or not.
Good luck and bad are always weaving themselves into human lives, leaving some people happy and others sad and others dead.
Read More Like This
- The Zurich Axioms by Max Gunther
- The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks
- The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason
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