Unscripted: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship pdfdrive com

TESTING YOUR LUCK
To diffuse the cloud that shadows luck, try this experiment. And be honest.
Call a coin flip. Winner wins a smile and pat on the back. Ready?
(((((((((((( FLIP ))))))))))))
It’s tails.
Did you call it correctly? If so, take a moment and think about your accurate
prediction. Would you now label yourself as “lucky”? Or if you called it
incorrectly, do you suddenly consider yourself unlucky? Probably neither
because you know the probability: coin flips are fifty-fifty chances of losing or
winning.
Now let’s switch gears.
What if a correct coin flip call would win $10 million? Suddenly the outcome
might be considered luck simply because the attached outcome is significant.
And yet the flipping odds or the mathematics never change. What changes? 
Your
perception.
In its purity, this is the essence of probability. When life’s chaos
diffuses into outcomes, probability becomes clouded and superstitious
explanations become likely.
Let’s take it further.
What if you had TEN chances to correctly call one coin flip to win the ten
million? Would you keep flipping? Or stop and reason, “Eh, I’m just not lucky.”
You see, moving probability is about trying. Hitting heads on one coin flip is 50
percent, but ten flips moves the probability to 99.4 percent. That means, just
because no one shared or commented on the great blog article you wrote doesn’t
mean the game ends. Just because your invention didn’t get funding or the 2Gs
blown on Facebook ads sold nothing, doesn’t mean dig your grave. 
Keep freaking
flipping!
The luck scam cripples your personal power. Motivation becomes anemic.
Believe in some mythic karmic force operating against your will and it will beat

---

you into bullshit excuses. Seriously, why try if you’re the unluckiest person alive?
When that happens, probability is not moved, and yeah, you fail to be lucky.
University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman, author of 
59
Seconds
(recommended read) and the founder of the “luck school,” has studied
luck for years. He says, “Unlucky people have almost no insight into the real
causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible
for much of their fortune.” Explaining further, he says, “Luck—bad or good—is
just what you call the results of a human being consciously interacting with
chance, and some people are better at interacting with chance than others.”
47
 So
how do you move the probabilities? You change your statistical universe.
LIFE’S GUMBALL MACHINE
Here’s how to change your luck.
First, picture a row of large gumball machines. Each machine has 1,000
gumballs of four assorted colors: white, orange, red, and gold, each varying in
their colored consistency. A cursory examination of each gumball machine
reveals mostly white and orange gumballs; while some machines have many reds
and no golds, others have few reds and many golds.
These gumball machines represent a life path, and the colored gumballs
represent the potential outcomes and consequences of that life path. When you
choose a life path (or wander through life), you’re assigned a machine and their
corresponding variation of colored gumballs. To receive a gumball, a coin is
deposited and the dial turned. This deposit and turn is 
action
—the effort that
spins the wheels of chance.
Once a coin is deposited, a gumball magically pops out. The gumball is a
consequence, a reaction, or an echo of your effort. After doing this several times,
you notice the gumballs spit out are mostly white, with a few oranges. A white
gumball simply means nothing, like an ineffectual macro-event. Your effort
yielded no results, consequences, or feedback. No harm done. However, the
orange gumballs represent some type of feedback, either as a learning experience,
a caution, a failure, or even a warning. The orange gumballs often have cryptic
messages etched on them, giving you more clues for your next spin.
Most of my life has been filled with orange and white gumballs. An orange
gumball told me it was time to sell real estate in 2006, sell my company in 2007,
and write another book in 2015. And then, every once in a while, a red gumball
pops out and messes everything up. Red is a catastrophic consequence, such as a
bankruptcy, an accident, or even getting caught driving intoxicated.

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As you continue depositing effort into the machine, eventually it happens. 
A
rare gold gumball pops out.
Congratulations, that’s when you hit it big: the event
from the process-principle! Success, fame, or fortune! And when it happens, life’s
SCRIPTED
couch warriors will accuse you of being giftedly lucky. Of course,
none of them witnessed your prior mis-spins and failed efforts or your skilled
decoding of orange balls. Once the starry-eyed see gold, it’s just “luck”!
Our life circumstances and their consequences are like this four-colored
gumball machine. Right now, you have a machine. Question is, what are its
contents? Is it filled with too many reds? Is your chance at hitting a gold one in
1,000? Or perhaps it’s zero?
A Sidewalker’s machine has no golds, many whites and oranges, and frankly,
too many reds. Treading the Slowlane? Similar outcome pool: Mostly whites,
some oranges, many reds, and few golds. Stock-market crash? Red. Lost your
job? Red. Laid off? Red. Health suffering because of too much work and too little
pay? Red.
Within the 
UNSCRIPTED
3(B)s, 
our objective is to change your gumball
machine’s contents
. A Slowlane or Sidewalk existence cranks for mostly
everything but gold. If life’s best-case scenario is a 2 percent pay raise, well, enjoy
the celebration dinner at Red Lobster. The fact is, many people work harder than
I do—the problem isn’t their work ethic; it’s their gumball machine. An
UNSCRIPTED
pursuit modifies this universe: reds disappear and golds sneak in.
POLARIZER: THE PROBABILITY PRINCIPLE
The probability-principle
replaces luck by modifying behavior on five fronts.
The first two behaviors acknowledge the causal effect of your gumball machine.
First, change your universe. Play games with better odds and returns without
accepting more risk. Your career path, your lifestyle, and your behavioral
routines determine your universe. And the best gumball machine available is the
UNSCRIPTED
Entrepreneurial Framework.
For example, take two brothers: Brother A and Brother B both work as
plumbers for the same company. After work, Brother A watches television, plays
video games, and drinks cheap beer. For hobbies, he goes on casino binges, often
wagering a week’s salary in the process.
Brother B doesn’t have a television. Instead, he’s an aspiring entrepreneur
who dives into books, learns code, and sells his inventions on Amazon. He
binges on webinars, trade shows, and 
Shark Tank
on Hulu. Now picture each
brother’s gumball machine.

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Brother A’s machine contains mostly white, few oranges and reds, but
absolutely no golds. Life’s best-case scenario is tripping at the casino and being
awarded an insurance payout. Brother B’s machine has a different constituency.
It also has some reds, many oranges and whites, but most important, it has some
golds. Brother B has changed his probability universe while Brother A is dialing
for white gumballs by doing nothing.
The second behavioral modification is 
action
so probabilities are altered. You
must deposit coins into the machine so probabilities are moved. Effort! Action!
Work! Crank, crank, crank! Depositing three coins and giving up because your
spin yielded two whites and one orange? Sorry, that’s not cutting it!
Imagine if you had a great talent for something and your default gumball
machine was filled with 20 percent gold balls. Throw in a growth mindset and
the gold balls increase to 25 percent. However, without effort deposited into the
machine, the probabilities are never tested. If you knew your machine had
twenty-five gold gumballs among 1,000, would you just stop at one crank? No,
keep cranking! Fifty spins beats five. Untested probability means “good luck”
avoids you.
The next three behavioral modifications are suggestions from Richard
Wiseman, the experimental psychologist on luck. His experiments conclude our
behavior can change luck if we mimic the traits associated with lucky people
while eliminating the unlucky ones. These three traits are 
intuition, routine, and
positivity
.
In Wiseman’s research, 
intuition
is critical to luck. People who trust their gut
and instincts are luckier than those who ignore them. Such 
feelings
can serve as
alarm bells while the unlucky person ignores their intuition and instead thinks
about things too rationally. For example, here are two things in the past that
seemed rational, but my gut screamed, NO!