Can 'luck school' teach you good fortune? Why worry, and data, are bad luck
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Can you change your luck in life just by thinking differently? Let me break free from this stream of bad news to talk for a big about The Plateau Effect again. If your summer didn't bring what you'd hoped, and if the arrival of back-to-school sales is making you feel discontented with your career or your life, this story might help. What you might need is a lucky break, and I think I can help with that.
The world has never been safer -- life expectancy attests to that -- but I think if you talk to most Americans (and most therapists), they'll agree our world has never been more anxious, either. Now that 24-hour news cycles fill our minds with fears about plane crashes, rare diseases, and tainted food, not to mention ruined children, it's pretty hard to avoid living from worry to worry. Much of that can be blamed on our human failing that our emotions are very bad at understanding mathematics. By that I mean the shark attack problem: A single attack can make a million people avoid the beach. That kind of outsized reaction to bad news is perfectly human, but with the feverish spread of bad news around the planet, this problem has become exponentially more severe.
We all know (excessive) worrying is bad for us, but here's a new reason to ponder that problem in your own life: Worry might be making you unlucky, too. But there's some good news. Some research suggests you can change your luck (what???)
I also think the Moneyball-inspired data slaves are making themselves unlucky, too. (I can't WAIT to see how irritated my mathematical friends will be by this post.)
Smartypants developer Chris Ambler just reminded me about the wonderful work of Richard Wiseman. He has spent many years studying the concept of luck, culminating in a book called The Luck Factor. His theories boil down to this: lucky people seem to spot or create chance opportunities better than unlucky people. Unlucky people are creatures of habit, which limits their odds that something unexpected might happen to them -- a chance meeting in an elevator or at a new coffee shop, for example. Unlucky people don't follow hunches, instead often relying only on their rational minds, which means their life choices, again, tend to follow predictable patterns.
Think about a person who goes to work at exactly the same time, following exactly the same route, takes lunch at the same place, at the same time, and so on. Such a person will ultimately bump into roughly the same people every day, severely limiting the possibility of a chance meeting with someone different who might offer a new career alternative or perspective. Folks who call themselves unlucky tend to live lives of predictability and rational decisions, Wiseman says.
If you've read The Plateau Effect (if you haven't, take a chance on it), you might recognize the main principle at play: Want to get unstuck? Introduce randomness into your life. Anything that we do in life leads to a plateau -- doing the same job, playing piano, running a business, building a relationship. Diversity is the antidote to plateaus. It's also, if I can put a few words in Mr. Wiseman's mouth, the key to being more lucky.
Wiseman even thinks he can send people to "luck school" and make them luckier. he describes luck school as a series of exercises that "helped (subjects) spot chance opportunities, listen to their intuition, expect to be lucky, and be more resilient to bad luck."
What kind of exercises make you more lucky? One subject Wiseman describes does this: He picks a color before going to a party, then forces himself to meet folks wearing that color. Doing so introduces randomness into his meetings. It helps break patterns.
What does this have to do with worry? Well, it's easy to see how folks who are worried rely on predictable patterns in life to sooth their nerves, limiting their chance at chance opportunities.
What does this have to do with Moneyball and data slaves? I've explained this before, but I'll do it again here. I was once pegged by CNBC as "Big Data Hater" because of my skepticism about the reign of spreadsheet-wielding managers rampaging through many American corporations, every one of them hoping to become the Oakland A's. This does not mean I hate data. Some of my best friends are data. It does mean that I believe data tells half the story -- ok, maybe even three-quarters of the story -- but there's also a great need to incorporate hunches, luck, randomness, and the human element into decisions big and small. One scientific reason: Data is by definition backward looking, and often has significantly less predictive ability than folks ascribe to it. In simple terms, people are easily hypnotized by spreadsheets, not realizing that numbers are imperfect and can in fact lie.
Mr. Wiseman's work reminds me of another important reason to keep spreadsheets in their proper place -- living by data means eliminating randomness, which is essential for good luck, Heck, let me remind all of us that randomness is Mother Nature's biggest magic trick! Randomness drives evolution. Meanwhile, limiting chance often makes things slowly decay. See this sad story which explains why domesticated dogs probably live about half as long as they should because humans have 'perfected' their gene pool.
So, if you find yourself wondering why Some Guys Have All The Luck, maybe there's a good answer. And maybe, today, you really can change your luck and get unstuck.
You could also pick up a copy of Wiseman's book, The Luck Factor The Luck Factor.