Book Notes

How to Get Lucky: 13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life's good breaks

1. Never confuse luck with planning. If you do that, you all but guarantee that your luck, in the long run, will be bad.
2. The point to be appreciated is that every run of luck must end sooner or later.
3. The first step in controlling your luck is to recognize that it exists.
4. The commandment of the Second Technique is: Go where events flow fastest. Surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things happening.
5. The lucky personality gets to know everybody in sight: the rich and the poor, the famous the humble, the sociable and even the friendless and the cranky.
6. If you’re a quiet person, then be quiet. All that is necessary is that you meet a lot of people and let them know just who you are.
7. There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take goofy risks; that is, risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. And the other is to take no risks at all.
8. “Work hard, spend wisely, invest safely, and let time do the rest,”
9. It is essential to take risks. Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely to happen to you.
10. No matter how you define success, risk is a necessary ingredient of every successful life. Risk puts you in position to win.
11. “Cut your losses,”
12. The lucky reaction is to wait a short time and see if the problems can be fixed or will go away, and then, if the answer is no, bail out. Cut losses short. This is what lucky people habitually do. To put it another way,
13. One reason why luck selection is so difficult for most people is that it almost always involves the need to abandon part of an investment. The investment may be in the form of time, commitment, love, money, or something else. Whatever it is, you leave some of it behind when you discard a bad hand.
14. Another reason why luck selection is difficult for most is that it often requires a painful confession: “I was wrong.”
15. Unfounded optimism is dangerous. On Wall Street, it is a killer.
16. “A superstition won’t do you any harm as long as you don’t use it as a substitute for thinking,”
17. The trouble with too much talk is that it can constrict that valuable freedom and flexibility. Talk can tie you up, lock you into positions that seem right today but may be wrong tomorrow.
18. By avoiding excessive communication, lucky men and women are freed of the need to explain and justify actions to other people.
19. The habit of deriving false lessons from life’s random happenings is a trait of the unlucky.
20. You can often predict what one individual will do, but only in rare circumstances
21. The fact is that fairness is a human concept. The rest of the universe knows nothing of it.
22. Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.
23. Don’t shun religion if it appeals to you. Shun only the ancient belief that God plans and directs every event in your life.
24. Our sense of fairness is powerful. The universe, however, is not under human control. It is indifferent to the concept of fairness, which we prize so highly, and so it is always confounding and enraging us.
25. The luckier are the busier.
26. Even at the height of success in a major venture such as a career, the lucky man or woman will usually have secondary ventures going or in preparation or under study – sometimes in bewildering variety.