Luck.. again?

All this thinking about luck(1 and 2), I've been seeing it from the one perspective. About seizing opportunities that present themselves in your time to make your life better, make the life you want.


What if you looked at it from the other side, all the ideas or inventions yet to be made, just waiting for the right person to come along and make them real? I imagine a lot of things just wait, wait and wait....


(On the other hand, you've got Schrodinger's cat, if they're not yet real ideas do they exist? And if someone thinks that the idea exists, without actually thinking the idea, does it exist then? Or what if someone thinks the idea, but then dies without telling anyone of their idea, and without the idea having influenced their actions? Can someone live without being affected by their thoughts? Or have thoughts unaffected by their life?)

Web comic! Questionable Content is great for mentioning random things. (Once there was LIDAR and I felt awesome)
warning: mature theme http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=715

Luck revisited

Another look at the illusion of luck in human lives. I did a post on this a while back, and I have found a new quote to illustrate the same idea!

"Chance favours the prepared mind"
Louis Pasteur

A friend and I were months ago discussing the novel (and movie) Stardust by Neil Gaiman. She told me that he was in the desert when he saw a star fall all the way to the Earth, when the story was born. My friend was amazed that at just seeing a star he would come up with all of that.


But I think that some people hold an idea in their minds at all times, and whenever anything new comes into their experience they (usually unsonsciously) juxtapose it with their idea, to see if it works. Of course, I can't presume to know what Neil Gaiman thinks, I'm simply noticing hints from the outside. Part of the reason I say this is that his other works often have two worlds, one of which may be hidden to the other.

No. 7 eau de toilette: success in a bottle

A page from a book about Wayne Gretzky reads, "For those blessed with the talent to make it and the luck to get the chance, the road from minor hockey to the National Hockey League is reasonably straightforward."

When I think of luck, I usually think of a quote that my mother once said to me:

Luck

is when preparation
meets opportunity

I'm not sure why some people actually believe in luck and others vehemently deny its existence, or what their views reveal about their faith in God and their own power to make things happen. I suppose it's just like any other personal belief, a subjective measurement of life's events and what caused them.

Personally, I think that anyone who leaves something ertirely up to luck is a fool. Luck does not pull third-remortgagers out of debt, nor does it make the stay-at-home blob become a millionaire in world market. 'Luck' is when someone who is an avid reader of a certain magazine and the people who run it meets one of its employees and subsequently gets a job there. If someone who didn't read the magazines carefully and know a lot about the history and the company met the same employee, it would be a much harder feat to accomplish.

The picture above (clouds), some would say, is a moment of luck, that I just happened to press the shutter at the right time. But that's not how it happened. I saw the cloud, took a few photos of it as it moved towards the sun, and eventually, shot this one.
In photography 'opportunity meets preparation' is the mantra: waiting in soggy fields for the target to come in view, holding an aching crouching position for the moment of perfect light.

In other areas of life, however, this is much less obvious... how do you prepare for what you don't even know is coming? Well a job in neural science with the most prestigious hospital or research group will come up eventually. To prepare for that is to get the education so you actually know what you're doing, be ready to act and have a plan the moment there is a lead to persue in your dream job. If you fail to prepare, the chances are quite slim you will be successful. Would you be in the right-most lane in 4-lane traffic if you knew, eventually, that you wanted to turn left? It's basically lining yourself up for the eventuality you want.

Oh... now I feel as though I've just taken the magic out of it.... But the point remains: opposite to what the title of this post suggests, you have to do a bit of work and waiting to achieve your dreams. But isn't it more worthwile?