I found this article to be excellent: It's better to be lucky than smart." "You make your own luck in life." "Some folks are just born lucky." In an environment marked by rising tensions and diminished expectations, most of us could use a little luck -- at our companies, in our careers, with our investments. Richard Wiseman thinks that he can help you find some. Wiseman, 37, is head of a psychology research department at the University of Hertfordshire in England. For the past eight years, he and his colleagues at the university's Perrott-Warrick Research Unit have studied what makes some people lucky and others not. After conducting thousands of interviews and hundreds of experiments, Wiseman now claims that he's cracked the code. Luck isn't due to kismet, karma, or coincidence, he says. Instead, lucky folks -- without even knowing it -- think and behave in ways that create good fortune in their lives. In his new book, The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life: The Four Essential Principles (Miramax, 2003), Wiseman reveals four approaches to life that turn certain people into luck magnets. (And, as luck would have it, he tells the rest of us how to improve our own odds.) Wiseman's four principles turn out to be slightly more polished renditions of some of the self-help canon's greatest hits. One thing Wiseman discovered, for example, was that when things go awry, the lucky "turn bad luck into good" by seeing how they can squeeze some benefit from the misfortune. (Lemonade, anyone?) The lucky also "expect good fortune," which no doubt has Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, grinning in his grave.....http://www.fastcompany.com/46732/how-make-your-own-luck
Somehow I've always wondered about this... Like are lucky people just born lucky or do they subconsciously make themselves lucky. I would think it would have to be a bit of both... I mean if a dude hits the jackpot at a casino, that's just pure luck, but the dude that keeps writing programs and eventually hits a killer app is basically "creating" his own luck. But then what about the guy who writes a thousand apps and none of them hit? Do we just tag him as unlucky or did he not perceive himself as being a success? It's hard to say...
I am a huge believer in skills... 1) skills to promote and build your own luck in the case of the programmers, who is to say the one hitting the jackpot spend more time with people who are "visionaries" or avant-guardists, hence ideas that hit the jackpot. In the same way there are skills to build your own bad luck. These are actually easy to avoid.
About 3.58% of coin tossing trading in SPY has generated a profit > 0 according to this study. Is this luck or just a random process where someone must win for someone else to lose? After all luck is only determined on hindsight.
Interesting article â I second the notion that positive thinking can lead to some awesome results. The key sometimes seems to be just always trying to move forward and think of something new. Youâre not going to be a success if you just sit around all day wallowing in misery.
Most trading vendors belong to this category, in my opinion. They are largely trading failures who turned their failures into marketing machines peddling garbage to suckers. You may call it "luck" but other words would probably describe it better. I do prefer skill. Luck is good, skill is better, much more reliable.