Back Home and a Return to Writing

We got back from our three-day break yesterday, and as usual, three days proved about right for us. Once we have explored an area and seen what there is to see, we tend to get restless. There is also the aquarium to consider. Leaving the fish unattended for much longer than three days is not something we are comfortable with, nor is it particularly healthy for them.

The weather probably helped. Rain had been forecast for two of the three days, but not a drop appeared. Instead, we had blistering sunshine from morning until evening, and I doubt either of us could have taken much more. I am now looking decidedly Greek Cypriot, while my partner has achieved something closer to sore red than Mediterranean brown. Coming home felt surprisingly good.

There is something comforting about walking through your own door, putting everything down and returning to the familiar places where you normally sit. Within a short time we were both settled into our usual positions, effectively having a break from the break. However pleasant it is to get away, your own chair, kitchen and routine quickly regain their appeal. For me, it also means a return to writing.

The Shadow Biography is progressing well, although thinking too far ahead about the work still to be done can be daunting. Writing the words is only part of producing a book, as I discovered with The Luck Illusion. There will be plenty of reading, rewriting, checking, cutting and reconsidering before I am satisfied with it. Fortunately, there is no hurry.

Autumn and winter are approaching, and I am rather looking forward to them. During the warmer months, there is always a slight feeling of guilt when I sit indoors writing. The sun is shining outside, and Bulgaria is giving us long warm days that seem too valuable to spend staring at a screen.

Once the colder weather arrives, that guilt disappears. Writing becomes exactly where I want to be.

The Shadow Biography has already taken several turns in the way I intend to present its arguments. A book can look wonderfully organised when reduced to chapter headings and notes, but once the writing begins, ideas start connecting in ways that were not obvious at the planning stage.

One thing I have been conscious of from the beginning is that I do not want this book simply to become another The Luck Illusion. The subject is different and deserves its own character. At the same time, I want to retain the essence of the writing style because that is not something I have to manufacture. It is simply how I write and, perhaps more importantly, how I think.

So the familiar day-to-day routine has returned, and with it something I value more than excitement these days: contentment.

I should probably admit that travelling no longer holds quite the attraction it once did. Since winning my fight with cancer and losing three ribs along the way, unfamiliar places are not always as comfortable as they used to be. Holidays once meant being constantly active. I was never particularly good at being a beach bum. I would jog, swim, cycle or hike, and if there happened to be a Bulgarian celebration taking place, I was quite capable of joining the street dancing. Staying still seemed like a waste of a holiday.

Most of those things are no longer possible in the way they once were, and that took some adjusting to.

Perhaps this is partly why writing has become so important to me. The exercise has moved elsewhere. My mind rarely sits still. There is always another question to examine, another assumption that does not quite make sense, or another idea that refuses to leave me alone until I have followed it somewhere. At the moment, much of that energy is going into The Shadow Biography.

The suitcases are unpacked, the sunburn is slowly settling, and we are back in our usual places. Outside, summer is beginning its gradual retreat. Inside, the new book is growing.

For now, I am perfectly happy with that.

The Beach DJ Nobody Asked For

 

The last few posts here have not been about books at all. This is understandable because I am trying to give writing, marketing and every other author-related matter a bit of a rest while enjoying the seaside and its surroundings. There is one thing I cannot leave at home, though, and that is an inquisitive mind.

We were sitting on the warm sand, listening to the waves breaking on the shore every few seconds, when a young man arrived on an all-terrain mountain bike laden with luggage. He parked near us and began unloading everything.

What emerged was a small portable office. A folding chair appeared, followed by a table, laptop, breakfast and coffee. Then the umbrella went up. It was quite an impressive arrangement, and there was nothing wrong with any of it.

Then the music started.

Obscene American rap music came blaring from his speaker at a volume that could be heard hundreds of metres away. The peaceful atmosphere he had presumably come to enjoy was instantly destroyed for everyone else.

I was livid. I tried hard to understand why anyone would think this was acceptable. There were plenty of other people on the beach, yet not one of them appeared to complain or even react. Whether they were more tolerant than me or simply unwilling to become involved, Who knows?

When I said that it was unfair for everyone else to be forced to listen to his choice of 'music,' my objection was dismissed as me being fussy. I then offered another possibility. Suppose I had brought a large hi-fi system onto the beach and started playing Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at full volume. Would that have been acceptable?

The answer was neither yes nor no, although I knew perfectly well what it would have been. Apparently, unwanted noise, which in my opinion is what this 'music' was, becomes more acceptable when it happens to be someone else’s unwanted noise/music.

Prevention may be better than a cure, but my hands were tied. Fortunately, I always take a pair of earplugs to the beach because I use them when swimming in the sea. On this occasion, they were required before I reached the water.

The plugs went in and the music disappeared completely. Unfortunately, so did the sound of the waves, the very sound I had come to hear. Still, silence was preferable to the performance being forced upon us.

About two hours later, I felt a nudge. I could not hear anything, so this was the only way to tell me that our unwanted DJ had packed away his office, loaded everything back onto his bicycle and left.

The earplugs came out, the waves returned and the beach sounded as it should again. Mahler would have to wait until I back home to Yambol.

When Emails Disappear

Today I discovered that many of the emails I have been sending are ending up in recipients’ spam folders. This may explain the lack of replies and, in turn, has done no favours to the promotion of The Luck Illusion.

After all the work I have put into this project, it was disheartening to find that potential leads towards reviews and sales may simply have disappeared into folders that few people ever examine. Calling it part of the learning curve does not make me feel any better. Some lessons arrive after the damage has already been done.

It appears that I was too enthusiastic when sending invitations to people who might be interested in receiving an advance review copy. A relatively new email address, combined with too many messages sent over a short period, apparently sent the wrong signals to the gods of email administration. Their judgement was swift. I was treated as a spammer, which I certainly am not.

I am now faced with repairing the reputation of my email account and ensuring that future messages arrive in inboxes rather than being quietly diverted elsewhere. Whether any of those missed opportunities can be recovered is another matter.

Nothing about publishing and promoting a book seems easy. Every time I think I understand one part of the process, another problem emerges from somewhere I had not thought to look.

Still, today was not entirely dominated by unwanted folders and vanishing emails. We saw a rainbow over the Black Sea, although no rain reached us, and fish was on the menu in the evening.

Perhaps the rainbow was a better message than any I managed to send.

On Hold, but Not Switched Off

 

For the first time in ages, everything was supposed to be on hold. My partner and I are spending a few days in Sarafovo, and the sensible plan was to leave my laptop at home and forget about writing until we returned.

I managed half of it. The laptop came with me.

For most of the day, I resisted looking at emails, checking what was happening with the book or thinking about the writing waiting for me. By evening, however, I could no longer stand the tension in my head about what might be going on online behind my back. It sounds ridiculous, but after spending so much time trying to keep everything moving, switching off begins to feel like neglect.

I eventually allowed myself a short window to deal with anything that genuinely needed attention, write this post and then close the laptop again. That, at least, was the agreement.

The holiday itself is going well, although the weather has other ideas. My partner and I settled ourselves on the beach in our swimwear, only for a rain shower to sweep across the area and soak us to the skin. We stayed where we were and gradually dried off during the sporadic sunshine that followed. It was not quite the beach experience we had imagined, but it became amusing once the initial discomfort had passed.

Heavy rain is forecast for tomorrow. Strangely, I felt rather pleased when I saw that. If the weather confines us to the apartment, I will have the perfect excuse to open the laptop and write again without feeling that I should be outside enjoying the beach.

Does that defeat the whole purpose of getting away and having a break? Possibly. Then again, writing is not always the part I need a break from. The emails, figures, promotion and constant feeling that something needs attention are far more tiring. If the rain gives me a few quiet hours to write, I may enjoy them.

The real test will come when the sun returns. Can I close the laptop and leave it closed?

We shall see.

Can I Leave the Laptop Behind?

 

I am going on holiday for a few days. A well-earned break, I think, although I am already considering taking my laptop with me.

There is still plenty to do. The Luck Illusion needs more marketing at a time when every day seems important, while The Shadow Biography has finally started moving again after being in limbo for six months. Leaving both behind, even briefly, is not as easy as it ought to be.

Of course, I could take the laptop and promise myself that I would use it only for an hour each morning. I know perfectly well how that would end. I would check one thing, notice another, answer a message, alter a paragraph and then wonder where half the day had gone. Meanwhile, the sun, sea and sand would be waiting for me to remember why I had travelled there.

I am retired, but seem to be working harder than when I was actually “at work”. Writing is only one part of producing a book. There is also editing, formatting, publishing, promotion, correspondence, advertising and the constant search for readers. Every completed job seems to uncover two more.

The difficulty is knowing when to stop. The Luck Illusion is still at a critical stage, and I do not want to lose what little momentum it has gained. At the same time, I am enthusiastic about the new book and reluctant to leave it alone just as it is beginning to take shape.

However, a holiday spent staring at a laptop would rather defeat the object. The books will still be waiting when I return, together with the marketing and the long list of unfinished jobs. Perhaps a few days away from them will even help me return with a clearer head.

Whether I can resist taking the laptop remains to be seen. If there are no posts here for a few days, you will know that I succeeded and am somewhere near the sea, trying not to think about books.

Returning to The Shadow Biography

I have resumed work on my second nonfiction book, 'The Shadow Biography', which I had left in limbo for nearly six months.

Since publishing 'The Luck Illusion', much of my time has been taken up by the excessive workload of marketing it. Writing a book is only part of the project, particularly for a self-published author. Once the writing is finished, there are files to prepare, platforms to manage, reviews to seek, booksellers to contact, and countless promotional tasks that seem to lead to several more.

I sometimes wonder how self-publishing authors find enough hours in the day to do all this without support. The raw writing may be the heart of a book, but it occupies only one part of an increasingly demanding process. Marketing 'The Luck Illusion' left scant time or concentration for another substantial piece of writing.

Even so, The Shadow Biography was never abandoned. I have now returned to it and begun working on adding to and refining the manuscript again.

I will not go into its central argument yet, except to say that it begins with another question that is rarely asked. That is one reason for my enthusiasm. I remain drawn to familiar parts of human life that we accept without examining closely, even when they influence how we understand ourselves and the lives we might have lived.

There is still a great deal to research, write, and revise, and I am not setting a publication date. For now, it is enough to say that after six months in limbo, The Shadow Biography is moving again.

What Readers Found in The Luck Illusion

 

When The Luck Illusion was published, I could not be certain which parts of the book readers would respond to. An author may know what he intended to say, but that does not mean the same message will survive the journey into somebody else’s mind.

The book questions the familiar habit of describing people as lucky or unlucky. My concern was that readers might mistake this for an attempt to deny chance or dismiss personal responsibility. The argument is more complicated than that. Chance exists, choices matter and people remain responsible for what they do, but none of those truths provides a complete account of why one life develops differently from another.

The first reviews showed that readers had understood this distinction.

Laura Hattersley, reviewing the book for Reedsy Discovery, wrote:

“This book ultimately replaces superstition by challenging readers to view success and failure more realistically.”

That description reaches the centre of the book. Luck is often used when an outcome surprises us or when its causes remain hidden. It offers a quick explanation, but it can also bring the investigation to an early end. Once somebody has been called fortunate or unfortunate, there may appear to be little more to ask.

The problem becomes clearer through Walsdos, the fictional case study that runs throughout the book. He works, saves, develops skills and forms relationships, yet his progress is repeatedly interrupted. Seen from a distance, his life appears to confirm the belief that some people are simply born unlucky.

A closer examination reveals something else. His setbacks have histories involving health, money, upbringing, geography, timing, opportunity and relationships. Probability plays its part, but every unexpected event enters a life that already has a structure. A financial loss will have a different effect on someone with savings than on someone already in debt. Illness will not cause the same disruption when security, support and treatment are readily available. The event may be similar, while everything surrounding it is different.

Jeyran Main of Review Tales Magazine recognised the balance I had tried to preserve:

“Its message is compassionate without being simplistic: outcomes are shaped by choices, but choices are also shaped by circumstances.”

Compassion can sometimes be mistaken for the removal of responsibility. It need not be. Understanding the conditions surrounding a decision does not require us to pretend that the decision was never made. It allows us to judge with more information.

This was especially important to me because The Luck Illusion was never intended as self-help or motivational advice. It does not promise that a different attitude will overcome every obstacle, nor does it suggest that effort is pointless because circumstances matter. Effort can alter what becomes possible, but it cannot guarantee the result.

The Goodreads responses reflected the argument's more personal impact. Monroe Peyton described it as:

“A short book with a lasting impact. Highly recommended!”

Samantha White wrote:

“The book challenged several of my assumptions and left me thinking long after I finished it.”

That idea of continuing to think after the final page matters to me. The book is deliberately compact, but its subject reaches into many ordinary judgements. We see somebody succeed and assume ability or determination. We see another person fail and look for weakness, poor choices or lack of effort. Occasionally those conclusions are justified, although the visible result rarely tells us enough on its own.

In her assessment for Vagabond, Dimana Trankova praised the way the book handles difficult ideas in simple language before concluding:

“We can say he has succeeded.”

Writing simply about a complicated subject presented its own difficulty. Causality, probability and human behaviour can quickly become abstract, which is why Walsdos remains present throughout the book. His story gives those ideas somewhere to live. Instead of discussing circumstance as a list of impersonal forces, the reader can see how those forces gather around one person and gradually shape what happens to him.

The practical Setback Audit extends that examination beyond his story. It asks readers to consider a difficult outcome without immediately reducing it to luck, failure, or personal inadequacy. What choices were made? What information was available at the time? Which pressures, resources and restrictions influenced those choices? What depended on timing or probability? Most importantly, what can still be changed?

The reviews have approached the book from different directions, yet they repeatedly return to the same qualities. They describe a book that is accessible without oversimplifying its subject, compassionate without excusing every action, and brief without leaving its central questions behind.

That is close to what I hoped The Luck Illusion would become, and it remains useful and deeply human. It asks us to pause before treating the word as a complete explanation.

The result is visible. The history behind it usually is not.

The Luck Illusion by Martin Signorin is available in Kindle and paperback editions.

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HBCBM5FB

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYQYB88B

The Luck Illusion Featured in Vagabond Magazine

I was very pleased to see The Luck Illusion reviewed and featured in the August 2026 edition of Vagabond magazine.

The article was written by editor Dimana Trankova and appeared under the title:

“The Luck Illusion: Martin Signorin takes us on an eye-opening journey towards the true meaning of success.”

Seeing the book receive this kind of attention in Bulgaria means a great deal to me. I have lived here since 2005, and much of the book was written here, so having it discussed in a respected English-language Bulgarian publication felt particularly significant.

The review looks at the book’s main concerns: success, failure and the causes that may sit behind what we often describe as luck. I was especially pleased that the article understood the book for what it is, rather than treating it as another motivational or self-help title.

One part of the review reads:

“...the author explains complex discoveries in fields such as psychology and statistics, and allows us to see Walsdos's story, and our own narratives, with new eyes.”

That was important to me because Walsdos was created to give the argument a human setting. His story is fictional, but the pressures, advantages, limitations and circumstances around him are very real.

For an independent author, a review like this carries real weight. Writing a book is mostly a solitary process. You spend months, sometimes years, developing an idea without knowing how another person will finally read it. When somebody understands what you were trying to do and takes the time to discuss it properly, it means more than simple praise.

My thanks go to Dimana Trankova and the Vagabond team for giving The Luck Illusion such thoughtful attention in the August edition.

The full feature can be read here:

THE LUCK ILLUSION | VAGABOND

The Luck Illusion is available in Kindle and paperback editions from Amazon:

The Luck Illusion

A Fictional Character in a Serious Nonfiction Book

 When I began writing The Luck Illusion, I knew I did not want the book to become a series of abstract arguments about psychology, philosophy, causality, success and failure.

Those subjects matter, but they can easily become distant from ordinary life.

That was why I created Walsdos.

He is fictional, but the circumstances around him are not. Through his life, the reader can see how different causes gather over time and how one event can affect what happens next.

There was another reason for making him fictional. Walsdos could be almost anyone. He could be me, you, or somebody whose life has been judged too quickly from the outside.

People are often described in simple terms. Successful. Unsuccessful. Fortunate. Unfortunate. Lucky. Unlucky.

But a life is rarely that simple.

Because Walsdos does not belong to one real person, his story can carry parts of many lives. His purpose is not to provide a case history, but to give the argument somewhere human to exist.

That became an important part of the book. Instead of discussing hidden causes only in theory, I could show how they might build around one person and gradually alter the direction of a life.

Walsdos never existed.

The pressures, choices, limitations and circumstances that shape him certainly do.

Serious Nonfiction Need Not Be Difficult

For years, I found many books on psychology and related subjects harder to approach than they needed to be. There seemed to be an assumption that if a book dealt with psychology, philosophy, causality, judgement, success or failure, it had to sound academic, contain endless references and demand considerable effort from the reader.

There is nothing wrong with academic writing when that is what the subject requires, but serious ideas do not have to be expressed in difficult language. A book can examine complicated questions without making the reader struggle through terminology that adds little to the argument.

Clear writing does not make an idea less serious. Nor does a shorter book necessarily have less to say. Sometimes saying something plainly requires more thought than surrounding it with language that makes it appear more complicated.

That was important to me when writing The Luck Illusion. The book deals with luck, causality, success, failure and the many influences that can shape what happens to people, but I did not want the reader to need a background in psychology or philosophy before being able to think about those subjects.

At the centre of the book is a fairly simple question: what do we leave out when we describe someone as lucky or unlucky?

There is a great deal behind that question, but I saw no reason to make the language difficult simply because the subject can be complicated. My intention was to make the argument clear enough for the reader to consider it, question it and perhaps apply some of it to experiences from their own life.

I have never believed that serious nonfiction should exist mainly to demonstrate how much the writer knows. Knowledge matters, but communicating it matters just as much. If an idea can be explained clearly without losing its meaning, I would rather explain it clearly.

There can sometimes be a reluctance to do this, as though straightforward writing somehow lowers the standing of serious nonfiction. I think the opposite. Psychology, philosophy and reasoning concern ordinary people because they deal with the way ordinary people think, judge, choose and live.

They should not become a closed form of communication understood only by those already familiar with the language.

A serious idea can still be a clear one.

The Pipe Was Not the Whole Story

 In The Luck Illusion, a pipe bursts above The Cornerstone only days before the business is due to open.

From the outside, it looks like bad timing and bad luck. That is an easy conclusion to reach, but the pipe itself was only part of the story.

What made the damage so serious was everything that already surrounded it. Savings were thin, insurance was limited, the building was old, the espresso machine was second-hand, there was no investor, no spare money and very little room for delay.

The pipe caused the damage, but the lack of margin around the business made recovery so difficult.

The same event would not have the same effect on everyone. For one person, it might be an inconvenience that could be repaired and forgotten. For another, it could be enough to bring everything to an end.

For Walsdos, it became the point at which the business could no longer recover.

That is why the word luck is not enough. It describes what happened from the outside, but it leaves out the conditions that gave the event its power.

The important question is not simply why the pipe burst.

It is why that one setback was enough to destroy everything.

That is the kind of question The Luck Illusion asks, and it is also what the word “luck” so often leaves out.

Why I Wrote The Luck Illusion

 I began writing The Luck Illusion because of a question that had been in my mind for years. Why do some people appear to move through life with few serious setbacks, while others seem to meet one difficulty after another?

We usually explain these differences by calling one person lucky and another unlucky. Someone gets the job, avoids an illness, meets the right person or happens to be in the right place at the right time. Someone else loses work, becomes ill, misses an opportunity or watches something they have worked for fall apart.

I became less interested in the label and more interested in what had actually caused the result.

Calling something lucky or unlucky tells us how an event looks from the outside. It does not necessarily tell us why it happened.

That question led me towards psychology, philosophy, probability and causality. These subjects have much to say about judgement, success, failure and the way people explain what happens to them, but the language can sometimes make ordinary human experience seem more complicated than it needs to be.

I wanted to write about these ideas in a way that could be understood without specialist knowledge. That did not mean making them simple. It meant using familiar situations and everyday experience to show how they work in real life.

Much of the book came from observation.

Over the years, I have seen capable people struggle despite doing much of what was expected of them. I have also seen others benefit from opportunities they could never have planned. I have seen poor decisions end well and sensible decisions end badly.

People themselves became part of the reference material. Their choices, mistakes, pressures, opportunities, relationships and circumstances formed an encyclopedia of human behaviour that had been building in my head for years.

None of this means that effort is unimportant. Nor does it mean that unexpected events do not happen. People make decisions, work hard, take risks and influence what follows.

But outcomes are rarely produced by one cause.

A person's health, money, education, family background, geography, relationships, timing and opportunities may all play a part. Some influences are obvious. Others remain hidden until much later, and some may never be recognised at all.

That was what I wanted to examine in The Luck Illusion.

The book came from a question that seemed simple at first but became less simple the longer I considered it. When we say that somebody was lucky or unlucky, are we really explaining what happened?

Or are we sometimes using the word because we have not yet looked closely enough at the causes?

The Result Is Not the Whole Account

 We are often too quick to judge the past from what eventually happened.

When someone succeeds, we look backwards and find the qualities that seem to explain it. Hard work, intelligence, courage, good judgement or determination. When someone fails, we often do the same thing in reverse and find poor planning, weakness, bad decisions or lack of effort.

The trouble is that the result can make everything that came before it look far more obvious than it really was.

This is one of the ideas behind The Luck Illusion. I became interested in the way we use luck to explain success, failure, opportunity, misfortune and timing, particularly when the word allows us to stop asking what actually happened.

Someone leaves home five minutes late and avoids an accident. We call that lucky. Someone works for years to build a business and then loses it after illness, debt, a change in the market or one badly timed problem. We call that unlucky.

The words may feel right, but they do not tell us very much.

What they often do is reduce a long sequence of events to one simple description. That matters because we usually see only the end of the sequence. We see the promotion, the successful business, the comfortable life or the failure. We do not necessarily see everything that helped to produce it.

A promotion may have followed years of work, but it may also have depended upon encouragement, useful contacts, good health, confidence, family support, money, geography or simply being noticed by the right person at the right time.

A business failure may involve mistakes, but it may also involve debt, illness, pressure, poor timing, limited choices or one setback that could not be absorbed because there was no money or support left to recover from it.

The person has not necessarily become wiser or more foolish. The circumstances around them may have changed.

Responsibility still matters. People make choices and those choices have consequences. But choices are made within conditions, and decisions are based upon the information available at the time.

That is easy to forget once we know what happened next.

A decision can look foolish afterwards because we are looking at it with information the person did not have when it was made. We know how the story ended. They did not.

The same thing happens when we judge ourselves. We look back at something that went wrong and think, I should have known. I should have seen it coming. I should have chosen differently.

Sometimes we are right. We may have ignored something, made a poor decision or taken a risk that should have been avoided. But sometimes hindsight gives us knowledge that simply was not available at the time.

The result carries great weight because it is visible. Once something succeeds or fails, it becomes easy to believe that the outcome proves the quality of everything that came before it.

I do not think it does.

Success should not automatically be treated as proof of superior judgement, just as failure should not automatically be taken as evidence of personal weakness. Some people succeed with considerable support around them. Others struggle after that support disappears or was never there in the first place.

Timing, health, money, family, education, confidence, relationships, geography, opportunity, delays and small unexpected events can all change what follows. Some of these influences are obvious. Others may never be noticed at all.

We often gather them together under the word luck because tracing every cause would be impossible.

But if we stop there, we may miss the more interesting part of the story.

The Luck Illusion questions simple explanations of success and failure. It asks what is lost when we judge a life mainly by where it ended up, and whether the result sometimes gives us too much confidence in our explanation of how it got there.

Results matter. They affect money, confidence, reputation, relationships and what becomes possible afterwards.

They simply do not tell us everything that came before them.

More About The Luck Illusion

Most people use the word luck without thinking very much about what it means. Someone succeeds and we say they were lucky. Someone fails and we call them unlucky. The word is familiar and useful, but it can also prevent us from asking what actually caused the result.

The Luck Illusion grew from my growing doubt that luck was enough of an explanation. I began to see it more as a shorthand for causes we had not noticed, understood or bothered to examine. That eventually led to one of the main ideas in the book: luck is compressed causality.

A result may look simple from the outside, but the events behind it rarely are. Timing, health, family background, education, money, geography, relationships, confidence, opportunity and the circumstances surrounding a decision can all influence where a person eventually ends up.

A sudden career success, for example, may appear to have come from nowhere. Yet behind it might be years of preparation, useful contacts, good health, financial security, encouragement and being in the right position when an opportunity appeared. None of that takes anything away from the person's effort, but effort was not acting alone.

The same applies to failure. Someone may make a poor decision and have to accept responsibility for it, but that decision might also have been made while under financial pressure, during illness, with little support or with very few alternatives available. Another person making the same mistake from a stronger position might recover quickly. Someone with no margin for error might not recover at all.

This is where I think the idea of luck can become misleading. It gives us a quick explanation when the real one may be much more complicated.

One of the points I return to in the book is that the result is not the whole account. We tend to see what finally happened and then judge everything that came before it from that position. Once the outcome is known, earlier decisions can look obvious. They were not necessarily obvious when they were being made.

This affects the way we judge other people, but it also affects the way we judge ourselves. Calling somebody lucky may overlook how much they did to reach that position. Calling somebody unlucky may hide the circumstances that worked against them. Describing someone as successful can make advantages disappear from the story, while describing someone as a failure can make limitations and pressures disappear just as easily.

Responsibility still matters. I have never wanted to suggest otherwise. People make choices and those choices have consequences. But choices are made within circumstances, and those circumstances can make some options possible and others almost impossible.

The book looks at this through psychology, philosophy, probability and ordinary human behaviour, but the questions themselves are quite simple. What shaped this result? What could the person influence? What was already outside their control? What seemed reasonable at the time? What only became obvious afterwards?

The Setback Audit near the end of the book comes from the same thinking. Rather than simply describing an event as bad luck or personal failure, it asks the reader to look more carefully at what happened. What pressures were present? What information was available? Were the margins too narrow? Could one problem be absorbed, or did it immediately create another?

These questions do not make uncertainty disappear. They simply give us a better way of examining it.

I think most of us already know that life is neither completely random nor completely under our control. We make decisions and influence what happens, but we do so inside conditions we did not entirely choose. Sometimes those conditions help us. Sometimes they make progress much harder.

That space between influence and uncertainty is where much of The Luck Illusion sits.

The book asks the reader to look again at moments they may have described as lucky or unlucky. Was an apparent stroke of luck really one isolated event, or was it the final result of several things coming together? Was a failure entirely personal, or were there other causes at work that were difficult to recognise at the time?

I do not argue that we should stop using the word luck. Sometimes it expresses exactly what we feel. It can describe relief, gratitude, shock or the sense that something happened beyond our control.

But once we have used the word, I think it is worth looking again.

There may be much more behind it than we first imagined.

Books I Revisit

 

Some books stay with me because I enjoyed them. Others stay because they continue to make me think. There is a difference.

A good book does not always need to be read twice. It may do exactly what it set out to do, leave something behind and then remain part of a particular time in life. Other books behave differently. They seem to wait. Years later, I can return to them and find something I had either missed or was not yet ready to understand.

Those are the books I value most.

I often return to George Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and essays such as Shooting an Elephant still interest me because Orwell was prepared to look directly at things that were uncomfortable. He was suspicious of slogans and easy explanations, and he understood how language can reveal something while also being used to hide it.

That has always mattered to me.

Success does not automatically prove wisdom, just as failure does not always prove foolishness. What looks obvious afterwards may not have been obvious at the time. A person who appears fortunate may have benefited from advantages that were never noticed, while someone judged unlucky may have been dealing with causes that remained hidden from view.

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is another book I return to. It examines the mistakes people make in judgement, particularly when they are convinced they are being rational. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness raises a related question that I find equally interesting: how often do people mistake randomness, timing, risk or advantage for their own judgement or ability?

That question sits close to the thinking behind The Luck Illusion.

I am also drawn to writers who notice ordinary life. Important things do not always happen in dramatic places. They can be found in a kitchen, a street, a café, a shop or in a small exchange between two people. A writer who notices these things can often say more about human behaviour than one who depends upon spectacle.

Laurie Lee does this beautifully. Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning remain books I can return to because of the way he writes about people, weather, hunger, music, memory and place. He reminds me that observation is not passive. To notice something properly is already to begin thinking about it.

I probably learned more from that than I realised at the time.

Living in Bulgaria has also changed the way I read travel writing. I am less interested in descriptions of scenery than I once was. What interests me more is what happens when people encounter a place that does not behave as they expected it to.

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water have that quality. He travelled with curiosity and was willing to be surprised. That matters. A foreign country does not exist to confirm the visitor’s assumptions. It has its own habits, humour, history and way of doing things. An outsider may understand some of it, misunderstand some of it and occasionally look rather foolish in the process.

Anyone who has lived for a long time in another country will recognise that.

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is another book I associate with this part of Europe. It is enormous, opinionated and not something I would treat as a final authority on the Balkans. But that is partly why it remains interesting. It gives the reader plenty to question as well as plenty to consider.

I have always been interested in books that show what happens to people under pressure. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath does this in a way that has stayed with me for years. Poverty, work, weather, migration, hunger, banks and pride all act upon individual lives. The people in the novel make choices, but those choices cannot be understood properly without understanding the conditions around them.

That idea has never really left me.

Albert Camus is different again. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider remove many of the comforts that people usually rely upon. Camus asks what is left when familiar explanations no longer provide much comfort. I do not find that bleak for its own sake. I find it useful because some questions should not be answered too quickly.

Graham Greene also returns to my shelves. The Quiet American and The Power and the Glory are full of people whose explanations of themselves do not always match what they actually do. Greene understood weakness, compromise and the difficulty of maintaining moral certainty when real life becomes involved.

That gap between what people believe about themselves and how they behave has always fascinated me.

I have never had much patience for language that exists mainly to display the writer. Style matters, of course, but for me it works best when it carries the thought rather than standing in front of it. Clear writing does not have to be plain or colourless. It can still contain humour, anger, sadness and beauty. It simply does not need to keep reminding the reader that the writer is there.

Orwell understood that. Steinbeck achieved it in another way. Greene did too.

The books I value most are not necessarily the ones I agree with. Sometimes disagreement is part of their value. A book can irritate me, make me stop, force me to reconsider something or leave me arguing with it long after I have put it down. That can be far more useful than reading something that confirms what I already thought.

This is also why rereading clearly matters.

A book read at seventeen is not the same book when read at thirty, fifty or later. The words have not changed, but the reader has. Something that once seemed important may become less convincing, while a sentence that passed unnoticed years earlier can suddenly carry much more weight.

Some books become smaller with age, some grow, and those are the ones worth keeping.

Reading and writing have always been closely connected for me. Reading shows me what works, but just as importantly, it shows me what does not. It reminds me when a straightforward sentence is enough, when an argument has been pushed too far and when something is better left for the reader to consider.

The books I return to have probably shaped my thinking more than I consciously realised. They have made me suspicious of simple conclusions and more interested in what lies behind them.

That influence can be seen in The Luck Illusion. The book grew from the same habit of looking again at explanations that seem obvious and asking whether they really tell us enough.

Luck was one of those explanations.

I wanted to know what might be hidden behind the word.

When I Am Not Writing

 

Writing is often thought of as something that happens only when a person sits down and begins putting words on a page. There is some truth in that, because concentration needs a certain amount of peace and quiet. But for me, much of the thinking happens away from the place where I actually write.

I walk a great deal, usually through the park in Yambol or along the River Tundzha. These are ordinary places rather than dramatic ones, and that is part of their appeal. The river moves steadily past while people walk their dogs, older men sit talking, children run ahead of their parents and others simply go about their day. Nothing is being arranged for anyone's benefit. It is just everyday life carrying on.

Walking gives thoughts room to move. Something that has been difficult to resolve while sitting at home can sometimes become clearer after twenty minutes beside the river. A sentence may come together, an argument may begin to make more sense or I may suddenly see that I have been approaching an idea from the wrong direction. On other days, nothing useful comes from it at all, which does not matter. I do not go for a walk expecting to return with a chapter.

I also cycle when the weather allows. It has a different effect. Walking gives me more time to notice what is happening around me, whereas cycling tends to clear my head. There is something about movement and having to concentrate on the road that pushes other thoughts into the background for a while. Quite often, an idea that has been bothering me seems easier to deal with afterwards.

One of the pleasures of living in Bulgaria is being able to sit outside at a café for much of the year. I am quite happy with a coffee and some time to watch what is happening around me. People meet, argue, laugh, complain, carry shopping, greet neighbours and disappear again. Most of it is completely ordinary, but ordinary behaviour is interesting when you pay attention to it. Much of what we are comes out in these small exchanges.

I also try to take part in local events when they happen. Having lived here for many years, I do not see these occasions simply as something to watch from the outside. They are part of living in a place. Village and town gatherings still bring people together in ways that can easily be overlooked. Food is shared, people help one another, traditions continue and everybody seems to know rather more about everybody else's business than they might elsewhere.

These occasions also remind me that people do not live separately from their surroundings. Family, neighbours, traditions, money, weather, habits, obligations and the place in which someone lives can all influence the way a life develops. That is something I have become increasingly interested in through my writing.

At weekends, when I can, I like going to the Black Sea. It is close enough to make the journey without turning it into a major expedition, but far enough away to feel like a change. The coast has a different pace from Yambol. There is more space, a wider horizon and the simple pleasure of being beside the sea. I usually return feeling that whatever had been occupying my mind before I left has become a little less important.

Reading is generally the last thing I do at night. I read in bed until I become too tired to continue. Sometimes that means only a few pages, while on other nights a book keeps me awake much longer than it should. I have done it for so long that going to sleep without reading would now feel strange.

So when I am not writing, there is nothing especially unusual going on. I walk, cycle, drink coffee, read, spend time around other people and occasionally go to the coast. But these ordinary parts of life have become important to the way I think and write.

People are interesting when they are simply being themselves. Places affect the way we behave. Small decisions lead to other decisions, circumstances change, relationships influence us and routines quietly shape our days. Most of this happens without anyone giving it much thought.

The coffee table in my living room is where I usually do the writing. The material for it comes from everywhere else.

What the Word Luck Leaves Out

 

There is a line in The Luck Illusion that says much of what the book is about in four words:

“Luck is compressed causality.”

I came to this idea because the word luck is used so easily. When something turns out well, we may say that a person was lucky. They met the right person, found the right job, avoided illness, received help at the right time or happened to be somewhere when an opportunity appeared. From the outside, it can look simple enough. Things went their way.

When the opposite happens, we do much the same thing. Someone becomes ill, loses money, lacks support, makes a poor decision, misses an opportunity or has to begin again after something goes wrong. We may look at what happened and say that they were unlucky.

I do not think the word itself is useless. There are times when it expresses something we genuinely feel. We use it when something unexpected happens, when we narrowly avoid trouble, when circumstances suddenly favour us or when events seem beyond our control. Sometimes it is also the easiest and kindest way of speaking about something that is difficult to explain.

The problem comes when luck is allowed to become the explanation.

Once we describe somebody as lucky or unlucky, there is a danger that we stop looking at what actually happened. A complicated sequence of events is reduced to one word, while the causes behind it remain hidden.

A person's position may have been shaped by money, health, education, confidence, family circumstances, relationships, geography, timing, access to information or the people they happened to know. Pressure, fear and risk may also have influenced decisions that later appear obvious when viewed from a distance.

Someone who succeeds may have made good choices and worked extremely hard. That should not be dismissed. But those choices may also have been supported by good health, financial security, useful contacts, education, time and the knowledge that one mistake would not destroy everything they had built.

Another person may appear to have failed because of poor decisions. Sometimes that judgement may be justified. People do make mistakes and responsibility still matters. But a decision made under pressure, with little money, limited information and no safety net, is not made under the same conditions as one made with several alternatives available.

The difference can be important.

A person with enough money, support and time may survive a mistake and try again. Someone with very little room for error may make the same mistake and find that the consequences follow them for years.

This is one reason I became uncomfortable with quick judgements about success and failure. If we ignore personal responsibility, we leave out something important. If we ignore circumstances, we leave out just as much.

Both have to be considered.

The Luck Illusion does not deny that chance events, timing, advantages and disadvantages affect people's lives. They clearly do. What I question is whether the word luck tells us very much about them.

Another line in the book asks:

“When we call a life lucky or unlucky, what are we no longer seeing?”

That question became important to me because the outcome is usually the easiest part to see. The events that produced it are often much less visible.

We see the successful business, but not every circumstance that helped it survive. We see the failure, but not always the pressures that came before it. We see where somebody ended up and then work backwards, often creating a much simpler story than the one they actually lived.

None of this means that every success is undeserved or every failure should be excused. It means only that the final result does not tell us everything we need to know.

Luck may describe how an outcome appears.

It does not necessarily explain what caused it.

The Luck Illusion: A Question We Rarely Ask

 

The Result Is Not the Whole Account

People often judge a life from the outcome they can see. A business fails, debt builds, an opportunity is missed or someone ends up in difficult circumstances, and the result is taken as an explanation for everything that came before it.

The failed business becomes evidence of poor judgement. The missed opportunity is put down to laziness or lack of ambition. A difficult life may simply be called unlucky. Once the outcome is visible, it is easy to look backwards and make the whole story seem obvious.

But it was not always obvious to the person living through it.

At the time decisions were made, the future was still unknown. Choices were made with whatever information, money, health, confidence, support and opportunity happened to be available. Fear, pressure, family circumstances and simple timing may also have played a part.

None of this removes responsibility. People make choices and those choices have consequences. The problem comes when we judge those choices as though the person already knew what was going to happen.

The result can make the past look much simpler than it really was.

This is also where luck often enters the story. When the causes are difficult to see, too numerous to follow or simply unknown, it becomes easy to say that one person was lucky and another was unlucky. The word gives the event a name, but it may tell us very little about why it happened.

A fair judgement needs more than the final outcome. It needs some understanding of the circumstances that existed before that outcome was known.

This does not mean excusing every mistake or blaming everything on circumstance. It means recognising that responsibility and circumstance exist at the same time.

The Luck Illusion asks whether the word luck sometimes prevents us from looking any further. Advantage, disadvantage, opportunity, timing, risk and unexpected events are real enough. The question is whether calling them luck explains anything about the causes behind them.

The result is what we see.

It is not always the whole account.

Why I Wrote The Luck Illusion

I wrote The Luck Illusion because one question kept returning to me. Why do some people appear to move through life with comparatively few obstacles, while others seem to face one difficulty after another, often for reasons that are not immediately obvious?

It was not a question that came from theory. It came from watching people and seeing how differently their lives developed. People can begin with similar hopes, abilities and intentions, yet end up in very different places.

Some appear to gather momentum. One opportunity leads to another, a decision works out well, somebody useful enters their life at the right moment, or a small success creates the conditions for something larger. Looking from the outside, it can seem as though life has simply gone their way.

For others, the opposite can happen. One setback does not remain an isolated event. Financial difficulty can create stress. Stress can affect health or relationships. Those problems can then make the original difficulty harder to escape. What began as one problem becomes part of a chain, and the person may find themselves moving further away from the position they were trying to reach.

What interested me was how often these very different outcomes were explained by one word: luck.

One person was lucky. Another was unlucky. The word was familiar and easy to use, but the more I thought about it, the less it seemed to explain. In many cases, it appeared to do the opposite. It brought the investigation to an end before the causes had really been considered.

That was when I began to question what we actually mean by luck. Is it something that acts upon us, or is it simply the name we give to an outcome when we cannot see, or do not know, everything that led to it?

What appears to be luck may involve timing, family background, money, education, geography, opportunity, relationships, health, decisions, systems, accidents and consequences. None of these works alone. They interact, and their effects can build over time.

That became the basis of The Luck Illusion.

The book does not argue that life is fair, and it does not suggest that people are in complete control of what happens to them. Quite the opposite. Our lives are shaped by influences we choose and influences we do not choose, and the balance between them is rarely simple.

Personal decisions matter, but they are made within circumstances. Effort matters, but effort does not guarantee an outcome. Opportunity matters, but opportunities are not distributed equally. A person may influence the direction of a life without ever having complete control over where that life eventually leads.

My concern was therefore not whether advantages and disadvantages exist. Clearly they do. The question was whether calling them luck helps us understand them.

I came to think that it often does not.

Once we describe something as lucky or unlucky, there is a danger that we stop looking. We accept the label and move on, even though the real explanation may involve a much longer chain of causes.

The Luck Illusion grew from my wish to examine that chain more carefully. It asks what lies behind the outcomes we so easily describe as fortune or misfortune, and whether luck is really an explanation at all.

I did not write the book because I believed I had found a neat answer. I wrote it because the familiar answer no longer seemed good enough.

Saying, “That’s just luck,” may describe how something feels.

It does not necessarily tell us why it happened.

The Allure of Martin Signorin’s Writing Style

Martin Signorin writes about familiar ideas that are often accepted without much thought. His approach is to take something that appears simple, examine it from several directions and ask whether the usual explanation is really enough.

In The Luck Illusion, this approach is applied to luck, success and failure. Rather than telling the reader what to believe, Signorin gradually questions assumptions that most of us have probably made at some point in our lives. Why does one person succeed while another struggles? How much is the result due to effort and ability, and how much has been shaped by less obvious circumstances? When we call something lucky or unlucky, are we explaining what happened or simply giving a name to something we do not fully understand?

These questions are typical of his style. The subject may begin with an ordinary word or experience, but the discussion gradually reveals that there is more beneath it.

An Accessible Style

One of the main features of Signorini’s writing is its accessibility. The subjects may involve psychology, philosophy, probability and human behaviour, but they are not presented as an academic exercise. The intention is to explore difficult questions in ordinary language without reducing them to simple answers.

Ideas are introduced gradually and usually begin with something familiar. A reader does not need specialist knowledge to follow the argument because the discussion grows from situations and judgements that are part of everyday life.

This is important to the way Signorin writes. A complicated idea is of little value to a general reader if it becomes buried beneath complicated language. The aim is not to make the writing sound clever, but to make the idea clear enough for the reader to consider it for themselves.

Using Story Within Nonfiction

Another feature of Signorin’s writing is the use of story to give a human setting to an abstract argument.

In The Luck Illusion, the fictional character Walsdos appears to be a man burdened by persistent bad luck. He works, makes plans and attempts to improve his circumstances, yet difficulties repeatedly interfere with his progress. At first, his story appears to support the ordinary idea that some people are simply unlucky.

As the book develops, that explanation becomes less convincing. His experiences are reconsidered through health, family circumstances, education, money, geography, relationships, timing and opportunity. What appeared to be a collection of unlucky events begins to look like a chain of connected causes.

The fictional story does not replace the nonfiction argument. It gives the reader someone through whom that argument can be considered. Instead of discussing circumstances only in the abstract, the reader can see what they might mean within a life.

Questioning Familiar Explanations

Signorin’s writing often begins with an explanation that seems reasonable and then asks what may be missing from it.

Success is an example. It is easy to look at someone who has succeeded and point towards hard work, talent, determination or good decisions. All of those may have mattered, but other influences may also have played an important part. The same applies when judging someone who has failed.

This does not mean that effort or responsibility should be dismissed. It means that they should be considered alongside the circumstances in which choices were made.

That distinction is central to the writing. The argument is rarely that a familiar explanation is completely wrong. More often, it is that the explanation is incomplete.

Looking at Human Behaviour

Human judgement is another important part of Signorin’s work. People naturally try to make sense of what happens around them, but the explanations we create are often based on limited information.

We see the successful business, not necessarily the years of circumstances that made it possible. We see the person who failed, but may know little about the disadvantages, interruptions or pressures that preceded the failure. We see the final result because that is the visible part.

Signorin is interested in what happens when we mistake that visible result for the whole story.

In The Luck Illusion, this develops into the idea that luck is compressed causality. The word can become a convenient way of describing an outcome when the causes behind it are too numerous, too distant or simply unknown.

A More Human View of Success and Failure

There is also an underlying concern with the way people judge one another.

If success is treated entirely as evidence of personal ability, it becomes easy to underestimate the part played by opportunity and circumstance. If failure is treated entirely as evidence of poor choices or weakness, it becomes equally easy to overlook the conditions in which that person was trying to succeed.

Signorin’s writing does not attempt to remove personal responsibility from the picture. It tries to put responsibility into a wider setting.

A person can make choices without controlling everything that follows from them. Two people can make similar efforts and receive very different results. Neither fact is particularly remarkable, yet we often speak about success and failure as though life should produce a predictable return on effort.

That contradiction provides much of the territory explored in his writing.

Writing That Leaves the Question Open

Signorin does not write to provide a set of instructions for living. His work is not intended as conventional self-help, nor does it promise a method for becoming luckier or more successful.

The purpose is closer to examination than instruction.

A familiar belief is taken apart, its assumptions are considered, and other possibilities are brought into view. The reader is then left to decide how much the original explanation still holds.

This is perhaps the most recognisable quality of Martin Signorin’s writing. It does not depend upon dramatic claims or easy conclusions. It asks the reader to look again at something they may have thought they already understood.

In The Luck Illusion, that something is luck.

The question beneath it is much larger: how much do we really know about the causes behind the lives we see?