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.