Luck: The Impact Outside Your Control

 

Iconic photograph of former US president Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt

After reading about Donald Trump surviving an assassination attempt, my friend remarked, "Kitna lucky tha! Agr ek inch bhi idhr udhr hota toh...". Ofcourse. when you compare this to John F. Kennedy's tragic assassination, it's clear that luck was on Trump's side.

Let me tell you a story from my school days. In class 9th ,We had two English teachers: S. Ali sir and M.K. Sinha sir. Each of them are very different from each other with respect to teaching, giving assignment and evaluating answersheet.
S. Ali sir was very punctual in all matters and he read every words from answersheet very carefully and give marks accordingly.
M.K. Sinha sir was a rare breed, He never bothered to take classes, neither to give assignments nor to ask about it ,No matter how much talented you are, whatever you written in your answersheet you will get just pass mark or simply you will be failed.

Any student would prefer S. Ali sir for evaluating thier answersheet and Ofcourse no one would choose M.K. Sinha sir for any type of evaluation. IFF they had a choice, 

Before the exam, we heard that only S. Ali sir would be grading the papers but circumstance changes, and luck played its role.

One class ended up with M.K. Sinha sir grading their papers, which results in an average score of 22 out of 50. No one scored above 30, and half the class failed.

Meanwhile, another class was very lucky to have S. Ali sir as their evaluator. Their average score was 38 out of 50, those who answered all question correctly they got 50 out of 50 also no one failed in that class.  

What was the parents' reaction after seeing the results? Did they blame their children's luck? Absolutely not.

The Ambani's

Recently, Ambani's wedding was everyone's gossip, like they are spending thousands of crore in their wedding, they had invited most of iconic faces from all over world in thier party, and bla bla bla.
The funny thing on everyone's mind was, "Why wasn't I born into the Ambani family?" Some might say it is because of good deeds in a past life, but let's be real, there is a long line of people with good karma are still waiting!

"When judging others, saying their success is all luck just makes you look jealous, even though you know luck is real. And when judging yourself, blaming your success on luck can be too depressing to handle."

"Bad things happen to good people."

Lets move another situation of two students: "A"  studied the entire syllabus and revised all the topics except a few rare ones(which never came in any previous examination), and "B," who had no idea what the syllabus was and read just few topics along with that rare one a night before the exam.
And guess what? In examination, Most of the questions came from that rare topic that "B" had studied. 
Isn't it surprising how luck favored the unprepared one?

AI generated pic of an aspirant

In UPSC 2023, Out of the 1.3million  candidates only 1016 candidates were selected with an overall success rate of 0.2% roughly. 
Forget rest of the candidates; assume they were just wasting time and money. I'm only concerned with one candidate—the 1017th!, did he/she not studied hard enough? what if this was his/her last attempt?

Millions of people out there who dream to become civil servant in this country. They don’t just dream—they study so hard as their body start melting!, they lives in conjusted rooms, keep distance from any type of distraction, forget friends and family and do many such things unimaginable just to achieve that goal. They do not bother about luck, whether it would favour them or not.

"Not all succes is due to hard work, and not all failure due to laziness and neglation, keep this in mind when judging people, including yourself !" -- M. Housel

Following or studying one person’s success, whether it’s Dhoni, Bill Gates, Newton, Modi, or anyone else-- is dangerous, Because these are least applicable to other situations, because some of the outcome was influenced by extreme ends of luck.  If you're following their footsteps, you also need to know the exact role of luck in their success.

"You are one person in a game with seven Billion other people and infinite moving parts. The accidental impact of actions outside of your control "luck" can be more consequential than the ones you consciously take."