On luck

There’s something different about meditating with other people. Not sure why, but for me the experience is different. And in Melbourne there are regular sessions within our community, but they are on the other side of the city. That means an hour to get there and an hour to get home … and so I never end up going.

Turns out there is also a regular Friday evening meditation session here in Buenos Aires. And the teacher who hosts it at her house, Chandi, lives exactly 12 blocks from our house. I rode my bike there in six minutes last week. In a city of 15 million people, we’re neighbours. Crazy.

I told my friend about it, and he told me “you are a guy with luck.” I love that phrase … it’s a direct translation of how you would say it in Spanish.

And I certainly am a guy with luck. For a start, I was born with pretty good genes, into a great family, in a good country, in a good time of history. None of which had anything to do with me.

I reckon you are probably a person with luck too. I think it’s worth considering that your successes and failures have a lot more to do with luck than we like to think. Nassim Taleb points out in Fooled by Randomness that we have evolved to see patterns that don’t exist, and to be really bad at identifying randomness (and consequently, luck).

It’s also worth considering that when we see people behaving badly, they are possibly a little less lucky.