When Someone Calls Your Book Liberating

There are plenty of things an author is pleased to hear about a book: that somebody enjoyed it, found it interesting or came away questioning something they had taken for granted. But liberating is not usually one of them. It is an unexpected word to hear about a book, and when a reader used it to describe The Luck Illusion, I was caught off guard. Why would a book about luck and causality feel like release?

I kept returning to that question, partly because I never considered "liberating" while writing the book. I had been concerned with the explanations we give to events after we know how they turned out. By then, of course, we have something the person living through them never had: the ending.

A business fails, a relationship ends, an opportunity disappears, or a decision takes us somewhere we never expected. Afterwards, we go back over what happened, and certain moments begin to stand out. Perhaps there was a mistake. Other people were involved, circumstances changed around us, we didn't know things, and events elsewhere eventually reached us. Once the ending is known, some of that becomes remarkably easy to lose.

Outcomes become judgements about people, including ourselves. Once we know what happened, it is surprisingly easy to build an account of the person around the result and leave much of what happened along the way behind. An earlier decision can look obvious in retrospect. Things we barely noticed at the time take on an importance they didn't have when we were making the decision. We know the ending.

Perhaps release comes into it when we return to an old decision and realise how much later knowledge we have attached to it. Years of later knowledge can attach to that old decision until it becomes hard to remember what we actually knew at the time. A poor choice may then appear far more obvious than it once did.

Success deserves the same scrutiny, although we are more comfortable with its stories. The work, persistence and decisions are easy enough to remember because we were there doing them. Somewhere in the account, the person who noticed us may receive less attention, along with an opportunity that arrived at the right moment, somebody else’s decision or circumstances that happened to favour us.

None of those other influences needs to diminish what somebody achieved. They are simply part of how it happened.

“Luck is compressed causality” became a phrase I returned to while writing the book. We say somebody was lucky or unlucky and somehow the word seems sufficient. Behind it may be years of decisions, other people, timing, accidents and circumstances we know nothing about. Usually we never get anywhere near the full account.

The Luck Illusion cannot recover every missing cause behind what has happened to us, and I suspect there are many we will never know about. I had always thought of the book in terms of understanding, and had given much less thought to what that understanding might actually feel like to somebody carrying an old failure around with them. Years later, we have accumulated information that was not there when the decision was made. It is very easy to forget when we learned it.

So, I take particular pleasure in somebody describing The Luck Illusion as liberating. I wanted readers to look more closely at the explanations we give to success and failure. I hadn't thought much about what might happen afterwards.

Somebody may return to something that happened years ago and still wish they had acted differently. Going over it again might bring back circumstances that had gradually disappeared from the story, without necessarily changing what they think they should have done.

Someone might even find that an old judgement no longer carries quite the weight it once did. If the book can do that, it has done more than I expected.