I have recently joined a Bloggers’ circle, named, appropriately enough, the Bloggers’ Circle. The idea is that each member should contribute four posts each month and comment on two blogs posted by other members.
Rowland Manthorpe has an interesting little post about luck, and why some seem to enjoy more of it than others. Rowland writes that chance is by definition events that are out of our control, but luck is something than we can, at least partially influence. Rowland quotes psychologist Richard Wiseman.
“Lucky people are social magnets who build “networks of luck”. They have a relaxed attitude towards life. They are open to new experiences. Lucky people listen to their hunches and gut feelings, and they anticipate good fortune in the future. They expect their interactions with others to be successful.”
Napoleon believed that luck was a personal attribute, rather than a matter of chance and when considering a promising young officer for promotion he is famously supposed to have declared, "Yes, yes I know he's brilliant, but is he lucky?”
Rowland writes that luck favours, not so much the brave, but the confident. I think this is an interesting point, but I think fortune and confidence probably feed off each other. For example, someone who has had a lucky start in life by being good looking, born into wealth or a loving family or by having a strong personality, is far more likely to be confident than someone who had the misfortune to be brought up in a dysfunctional family or experience bullying early in life. Luck breeds confidence and confidence breeds luck.
No-one ever said that life was fair or that it was necessarily easy; indeed chance can often intervene with devastating consequences for the most confident of people or with the redemptive consequences for those confidence is at rock bottom. While people maybe able influence the amount of luck they enjoy, surely they can’t control it entirely, and perhaps the most important thing is to savour every piece of good luck that comes our way.
