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?