Your thoughts about "Luck"

I’ve recently found myself revisiting an idea that has fascinated me for years:

What if being “lucky” is actually a skill that can be learned?

I’ve explored this from a few different angles.

Spiritually, I’ve wondered about karma. Do the intentions, energy and actions we put into the world somehow influence the circumstances that eventually find their way back to us?

Interestingly, the traditional concept of karma is deeper than the modern idea of “do something good and something lucky will happen.” In Buddhist philosophy, intention matters enormously. Karma literally relates to action, and our intentional actions are believed to produce consequences. Classical Indian philosophy similarly treats karma as a causal relationship between actions and their eventual “fruit.”

Whether you accept that literally, metaphorically, or not at all, the concept raises an interesting question:

Can the way we live actually change the amount of “luck” we encounter?

Then there’s a completely different explanation.

Maybe we manufacture luck simply by creating more opportunities for unlikely things to happen.

Meet more people.

Try more things.

Ask more questions.

Take intelligent risks.

Enter more tournaments.

Start more projects.

Have conversations with strangers.

Go places you normally wouldn’t go.

Say YES a little more often.

If an opportunity has only a small probability of occurring, sitting on the couch gives it almost no opportunity to find you.

Put yourself into enough situations where something could happen, however, and suddenly you’ve increased your exposure to positive randomness.

That isn't magic.

It's probability.

And there’s actually research surprisingly close to this idea.

Christian Busch's research on serendipity describes it as something more than blind luck. His systematic review in the Journal of Management Studies identified three components: agency, surprise and value. In other words, something unexpected happens, but a person still has to recognize it and do something with it.

Psychologist Wendy Ross made a similar argument in a 2024 paper on the cognitive processes behind serendipity. She describes it as an interaction between a fortuitous event and a prepared human mind capable of recognizing what just appeared.

That sounds remarkably close to:

You can't control when luck knocks, but you can get better at hearing the knock.

Then poker brought me right back to this subject.

I was watching Chance Kornuth interview Alex Foxen on the Chip Leader Coaching channel. Deep into the conversation, Chance gave Alex a simple choice:

Luck or skill?

Alex responded:

“What if being lucky is also a skill?”

That stopped me.

Because poker may be one of the greatest laboratories ever created for examining this question.

You cannot control the next card.

But you CAN control whether you're in the hand.

You can control your preparation.

Your decisions.

Your bankroll.

The games you choose.

The risks you take.

The people you meet.

The tournaments you enter.

How often you put yourself in position to capitalize when variance finally swings your way.

And there’s an important warning here too.

Psychological research has also shown that simply believing you're lucky can make people more willing to take risks, sometimes irrationally. So “creating luck” can't mean blindly gambling harder and assuming the universe owes you something.

Maybe the real skill is learning the difference between recklessness and intelligently increasing your exposure to opportunity.

So perhaps luck has several layers:

Random luck exists.

Karma may exist.

But there may also be a form of luck that we actively cultivate through our decisions, relationships, preparation, curiosity, resilience and willingness to take calculated risks.

Maybe the luckiest people aren't necessarily receiving more miracles.

Maybe they're creating more places for miracles to land.

That brings me to the question I'm genuinely interested in hearing people's answers to:

Do you believe being lucky is a skill?

Have you noticed periods in your own life when taking more chances, meeting more people, helping others, following intuition or simply putting yourself out there seemed to create an unusual amount of “good luck”?

And on the other side, have you ever felt that your own choices somehow created a streak of bad luck?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have observed this pattern over decades, not just once or twice.

Is luck random?

Is it karma?

Is it probability?

Is it mindset?

Is it a skill?

Or is it some combination of all of them?

I’m not convinced I know the answer.

But Alex Foxen's question may be much deeper than it first appears:

What if being lucky is a skill?

Research rabbit holes for anyone interested: Christian Busch, Towards a Theory of Serendipity (Journal of Management Studies); Wendy Ross, Accidental Thinking: A Model of Serendipity’s Cognitive Processes (2024); Darke & Freedman, research on belief in good luck, confidence and risk-taking; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy discussions of karma in Buddhist and classical Indian philosophy.

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Your thoughts about "Luck"