Luck: The Winner's Curse

A repost from the old blog of posts I like.

My wife calls it the “Kelsey Effect” – the idea that as soon as I alight upon something they or it become subject to a series of unexpected mishaps. Cars break down, houses crumble, companies collapse, even whole industry sectors go into crisis. Horses, football teams, charities, even previous girlfriends have all suffered misfortune once they have won my attention. And my wife also likes to joke about the “Kelsey Cloud" that follow us on holiday, pointing out that we even had rain on our trip to the Sahara Desert.

Certainly, from a young age I have considered myself unlucky. Always in the wrong place, at the wrong time – too far from the action or ill-prepared for the events unfolding disastrously in front of me. But I don’t anymore. Not because my luck has changed, although I’m most definitely in a more fortunate place than I’ve ever been. The reason I no longer feel unlucky is because I no longer believe in the concept of luck.

In Make Your Own Luck (2005), Eileen C. Shapiro and Howard H. Stevenson focus on the idea that no one ever has enough time or facts to know they are making the right judgement calls. Indeed, nearly all decisions – including life-changing ones such as what career to pursue and who, or whether, to marry – are based on incomplete information. So when someone is noted for being lucky – i.e. that the outcomes of these decisions are usually positive – people are actually admiring what Shapiro and Stevenson call that person’s sense of “predictive intelligence”.

“The higher your predictive intelligence, the more you will be able to make your own luck,” they state.

This leads to some obvious questions, such as what is predictive intelligence and how can I get hold of some? They claim there are 12 steps to gaining predictive intelligence – what they call the “gambler’s dozen”. Indeed, their main focus is on betting (although they broaden the concept), which may well make their steps for acquiring predictive intelligence not the only 12-steps programme required by those applying their recommendations too eagerly.

And this brings me to my main point. That I now view luck as the winner’s curse. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it is in fact no more than rational thinking. For a start, in the vast majority of cases the word “luck” can be replaced with “focus” (a notion supported by Shapiro and Stevenson).

Certainly, I noticed that my luck seemed to change once I became fully focused on a particular goal, at least with respect to that goal. Opportunities would appear at the right moment and obstacles disappear – I’d come across the right person or piece of information just as I needed them or it. Yet this wasn’t luck at all. It was intense concentration. In fact it was my Reticular Activating System (RAS) – the area of the brain responsible for regulating arousal.

We all have this, although may not recognise it as such. I used to call it my “antennae” – the element of my consciousness that seems to notice the things that currently interest me. Usually this is frivolous. If I was thinking of buying a particular car, for instance, my RAS would start noticing that model whether it was parked in a side street or flashing by on the opposite motorway carriage. Or if I was wearing a particular brand of scarf, I’d notice people wearing that scarf when I’d previously ignored them. Yet even with respect to business opportunities or – more recently – ideas for blogs or additional thoughts for the book, options would present themselves and events conspire in my favour, when previously they had gone ignored or conspired against me: all thanks to my RAS.

Of course, the RAS alone cannot help us. We need to programme it correctly – most obviously by adding strong long-term objectives with calculated short and medium-term milestones. Indeed, most “unlucky” people can also blame their RAS – as can many that blame their poor fortune on innate ineptitude or even prejudice against them. Programme your RAS accordingly and it will deliver what you seek – including confirmation of inabilities or bias, and certainly including misfortunes to confirm jinx-style qualities of the “Kelsey Effect” type. Programme it positively, however, and your RAS will help turn the fortunes of even the unluckiest of people.

And that, of course, brings us to that famous quote, attributed to Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Samuel Goldwyn and God knows who else: “Of course I believe in luck. And the harder I practice the luckier I get”, although perhaps our own version should conclude: “And the more I focus on my long term objectives, the harder my RAS works in my favour”.

Finally, it is worth noting that there are also positives to being unlucky. For me, my poor luck has meant an adulthood hating gambling, in all its forms (including that “tax on the stupid” known as the National Lottery), which I now view as an enormous blessing. Certainly, I consider those “lucky” gamblers cursed – their arrogance making them over-estimate purely mathematical probabilities. More-often-than-not gambling results in the most rapid levelling of the “lucky” and the “unlucky” known to man, a fate that I’ve joyfully avoided thanks to my “poor luck”.

Poor luck has also led me towards a hatred of “winging it” in meetings and presentations. I am consistently the best briefed and prepped, precisely because I assumed I had to make amends for my poor luck – a weakness that, over the years, has increasingly worked in my favour. In fact this adds a last consideration on luck – that of age. As a young person the cocky assurance of “the lucky” is certainly a plus when it comes to winning the girl/boy or convincing employers to give them that first break. But life is a marathon, not a sprint, and luck will inevitably go against those relying on that most ephemeral of attributes. Meanwhile, I have assumed poor luck from the start, which has prepared me well for the inevitable puddles along the way, many of which I now deftly sidestep – including those on our summer holiday.