How Luck Happens

The connection to the great inventor Thomas Edison—the guy who said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration

British biologists P. M. Driver and D. A. Humphries spent three decades studying animal behavior and figured out that doing the unexpected is one of the best survival skills around.

The luckiest and most successful people often look like they’re taking risks, but they always have a floor under them so they can’t fall too far,” Barnaby said. “I hear that again and again from people who have made fortunes. Instead of risking everything, they make their luck by seeing what others don’t and capturing opportunity.”

“We can’t remove all risks, and life is always about trade-offs,

Pick the statistic you want to be,”

I started to think of the three elements of luck as being like one of those old-fashioned slot machines where you pull the handle and three items have to line up in a row. People get addicted to waiting for the three cherries, for example, to appear next to one another. Psychologists call it “variable ratio reinforcement”—you don’t know when you’ll get the reward, so you keep trying, expecting it to appear at the next pull of the handle.