Consider the drafts of Montaigne: they bristle with the prolonged torture of corrections, additions and alterations; endless careful detailed polishing that makes one realise the clichéd schoolmaster’s advice of 10% inspiration 90% perspiration holds true even in the rarefied air of innate talent. Or look at Raphael’s drawings after he has studied the masters and learnt to do perspective. They may look like the effortless strokes born of raw talent alone, but with the context of his earlier drawings I think one could attribute the improvement mainly to years of diligent mimicry, a painstaking transfer of skills by proxy if you like. How prosaic and disappointing to imagine these elite creatures having to stoop to practice in order to make their work seem effortless! (Meanwhile the world is probably awash with lazy geniuses who have come to nothing because they expected their talent to somehow allow circumvention of the work required to bring it to fruition).

Sure, not every web designer will be a Mozart but you’d be surprised how far graft can take one. To deny an aspirant the chance of success because he’s not “built correctly” from birth is to deny the immense and constantly surprising power of humans to learn and adapt, indeed perhaps to create versions of internal circuitry with which luckier ones may have come pre-installed. What is our brain but a malleable electrochemical soup after all? No hardwired semiconductors in place that a priori necessarily deny change. The obvious can become signficant with practice, though yes to the innately talented it will of probably come more easily and to a larger degree. Even if it doesn’t, there is hope for all for are prepared to devote time to getting the details right, honing practical skills on the field of experience and slowly piecing things together, just as there is room for a skilled joiner to work alongside a cabinet maker. Indeed the lazy cabinet maker may have to watch out that he is not replaced.

Of course there must be the occasional person who enjoys an “incredible” streak betting on the nags, just as a coin will sometimes produce an “amazing” run of nine or more heads in a row. But they are not gifted, at least in any mystical sense (though they may well be deft at analysing form, for instance) merely perched further towards the end of the bell curve.

Indeed, when humans are asked to write down a sequence that represents a realistic series of coin flips, they invariably underestimate the frequency and extent of these runs. For instance they might write HTHHTHTTHHTHTHT whereas something lumpier, such as HHHHTHHHTTTHTTTTT would be more representative of reality.

Similarly, someone killed by a falling durian might be considered dreadfully unlucky (once the inevitable guilty chuckles had stopped) but is simply the victim of a remote probability that they chose to increase significantly by standing under a tree that kills several unfortunates a year. (The latin name for durian means “smells like a civet cat” by the way. ) Meanwhile someone must win the lottery – no luck in that, it’s eventually a 100% certainty – while every other entrant is taxed on their failure to grasp how pathetically minuscule are the odds of a pre-chosen person winning.

People who consider themselves lucky generally have a more positive outlook on life. Good events are highlighted in their memory while bad events fade. A positive outlook will be reflected in their response to certain circumstances and availability to spot and act upon opportunities; the opposite is true for the “unlucky”. This has a cumulative effect which is bad news for the “unlucky” person because they are likely to become increasingly aware of every bad event and increasingly dismissive of good ones, falling into a vicious spiral of irrational “the fates must really have it in for me” paranoia. This type of person often fails to take responsibility for his own actions, preferring instead the easy cop out of fatalism, or worse, puts their faith in astrology. This doesn’t usually help.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” – Seneca

“The harder I work, the luckier I become.” (Jefferson?)

I note that no fewer than 380 lucky horseshoes were sold on eBay in the last 15 days. Sadly I doubt it was cheaply to meet the needs of 95 barefooted nags.

1. Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift. (Stoppard)
2. Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty. (Frank Herbert)
3. Not being able to govern events, I govern myself. (Montaigne)
4. To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence. (Nietzsche)
5. Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads. (Jong)
6. Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. (Sanders Law)
7. Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. (Byrnes)
8. We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. (Dawkins)