Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

YOU CREATE YOUR OWN LUCK
Often people ask me about the role of 
luck
in success. They are con-
vinced that luck is a critical factor in achieving anything worth-
while. They feel that some people are just lucky and some are not.
They talk about luck as if it were a matter of fate or destiny, largely
inexplicable. They insist that a person gets to the top of his field
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CHANGE YOUR THINKING, CHANGE YOUR LIFE
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largely as the result of getting lucky breaks, which they, of course,
did not get.
I have studied the concept of luck for many years. My conclu-
sion is that luck is a word that people use to explain away things that
turn out much better than could have been expected. If a person
achieves great financial success at a young age, people say he was
“just lucky.”
Some people use luck to describe something remarkably good
that happens that is out of the ordinary. But it is not luck at all. The
fact is that all so-called lucky outcomes are really the result of 
prob-
abilities
. There is no such thing as luck.
The Law of Probabilities says that there is a probability for
everything that happens. These probabilities can often be deter-
mined with considerable accuracy. The entire insurance and under-
writing industry is based on probabilities, which are expressed in
actuarial tables.
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