Even Losers Get Lucky

Embracing Serendipity with Humility

In the words of the great American philosopher Tom Petty, “Baby, even the losers get lucky sometimes.” He was, of course, correct because, after all, that is how luck works. You never know beforehand how chance events will shake out in the multifaceted complexity of the real world. At the same time, luck can seem anything but random.

Sometimes we are in Albert King’s shoes, feeling that “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all,” and on the other side, we all know people who seem like they were born with a horseshoe in an uncomfortable orifice. Alternatively, it is part of the Protestant intellectual legacy that forms the backdrop of the American sensibility that we make our own luck, that we get what we deserve. But if that is the case, how do we make sense of the losers getting lucky sometimes?

Luck, Fate, and Chaos

We need to distinguish between the distinct concepts of luck, fate, and accident that we too often conflate. All of these are similar in that they defy being foreseen, but they are very different notions.

When we say that something is fate, then it means that some major outcome that will shape one’s life—or end it—is unavoidable, regardless of the decisions one makes. Consider Oedipus’ father, who was fated to be killed by his son. He did all that he could to avoid this outcome, but no matter his choices and actions, it would come to pass. This is not the result of luck since the result is not random. It may be the case that improbable events occur to counteract the expectations of those who make decisions in an attempt to avoid their fate, but because the fate was foretold, those events are necessary, not lucky.

Similarly, accidents are not a matter of luck. An accident occurs when the normal laws are followed exactly as they have to be, but in an unexpected way. Neither driver likely wanted to be involved in a fender-bender, but, given the decisions they made, the result is what naturally would have had to have happened.

In physics, this is the difference between randomness and chaos. In quantum mechanics, a system can be in what we call a state of superposition before it is measured, that is, a strange combination of every possible value without being in any particular one. But then it collapses into a single property state the instant it is measured. What is strange about the theory is that there is absolutely no way before the measurement to know which value will end up being the result of the measurement. It is completely random, and therefore a matter of luck, if, say, a given electron was measured to be spin up instead of spin down.

But chaos is not random. Indeed, chaos is completely deterministic, but it is governed by an equation that is what we call “non-linear.” That means that while the initial conditions completely determine the outcome, the equation is super sensitive so that infinitesimally different inputs may give rise to radically different outputs. Often, these differences will be smaller than we can measure. As a result, the state of the system at the end is completely determined by the state of the system going in and the non-linear equation governing the system, but we cannot be sufficiently clear about the exact state going in, and so cannot be sure of the state of the system afterward.

Much of life is accidental because the world has so many moving parts. When we deliberate about the choices we make, we try to enumerate all of the operative factors under our control. But there are always others that are beyond our capacity to not only regulate but even to be aware of. The world is more complex than our understanding of it, and while we reap what we sow, we are too often unaware of what the seeds actually are.

So, while we may have a fate and we certainly will face accidental circumstances, there will also be parts of life that involve luck. There are some situations where the outcome is underdetermined, where even having full knowledge of ourselves and our surroundings is not enough to know what will pop up. Life involves luck, or as 19th century German Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Frederick Hegel explained, bad infinity, where living has little to no direction, no predictable outcomes, living the life of unpredictable pin balls going in all directions, which is no direction at all.

Making Your Own Luck

Image: onlinebetting.org.uk

So, if luck cannot be eliminated, can it be controlled? Do we make our own luck? Yes and no.

Consider the first scene of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which the two title characters are flipping coins as they walk, while one gives the production’s opening soliloquy. According to the game, one gets the coin if it comes up heads and the other gets it if it comes up tails. Over a long period of time, one would expect that the number of coins each has would be roughly equal. But the first joke of the play is that all of the coins are coming up heads. While this is unlikely, it is possible. It would be an incredible streak of luck to win that many 50-50 bets in a row.

As an audience, we cannot help but think that the game has been rigged, that one of them is running a con, that perhaps they are using weighted coins so that the probability is not the one-half we normally expect. One can create a coin such that it will come up heads three-quarters of the time. Despite this tilting of the playing field, the outcome is still a matter of luck because it is random, though not equiprobable, which side the coin will land upon for any given flip. But while it is a matter of luck, that luck has been tampered with.

We often tamper with our luck in this way. Maybe we educate ourselves to make it more likely that an opportunity will present itself, or rehearse what we will do to seize the moment if it occurs, or hang out around the scouts hoping our talent will be discovered. We often try to weigh the coin of life. But underneath it all, it remains random. It is a matter of luck.

But we are wired to deny it some of the time. Social psychologists have discovered cognitive biases, reasoning errors built into our minds, that lead us to sometimes underestimate the place of luck. Because we spend so much time envisioning things going our way and because we sometimes work hard to tamper with the luck, when we are lucky, we often deny the role of luck and prefer to believe that the positive outcome was the necessary effect of our effort. We didn’t get lucky, we earned it.

Conversely, when luck fails to favor us, we still try to concoct some sort of narrative to justify our lack of success. This is the impulse behind conspiracy theories. I wanted it. I tried to get it. I failed. Therefore, it wasn’t me, but some hidden cause that wrongly took it from me.

We are loath to accept the place of luck in our lives because it exposes us to the fact that so much of what we have, what we get, and what we do are not the result of our deserving it but just falling into it. It seems to diminish us, our dreams, and our labor.

But so much of life is about luck, and by accepting that, we can adopt a healthier perspective of gratitude and balance. Because we can tamper with the luck, we still need to strive and work, but we also need to acknowledge that the universe is complicated and not centered around us. We need to be humble before the workings of the world, and that begins with the acceptance of the place of luck. It is absolutely true that “baby, the losers get lucky sometimes,” but we need to be honest with ourselves that sometimes we are the losers, but even then, there is always hope, as Tom Petty reminds us.