Making your own luck

From https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/some-people-are-just-lucky-you-can-make-yourself-one-of-them-5f7c7329?st=mnyie7mvc8jolc7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Some People Are Just Lucky. You Can Make Yourself One of Them.

Unlucky people skip over opportunities right in front of them. Make sure you don’t miss out.

By Rachel Feintzeig

Nov. 12, 2023 9:00 pm ET

138 RESPONSES

Nir Zicherman was a mediocre law student having trouble landing a summer internship. On his way to an interview, he got in an elevator and made a joke to the woman next to him, who was holding a tray of coffee cups.

“You must really like coffee,” he said. It changed his life.

The woman, it turned out, was the hiring manager for the job he was going for in NASA’s legal department. She loved the joke and gave him the internship. The summer stint inspired Zicherman to teach himself to code, scrap his law career for tech and eventually co-found a startup. He sold it to Spotify for millions in 2019.

“It’s just, like, everything can be traced back to that one elevator ride,” says Zicherman, now an entrepreneur and writer in New Jersey.

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We like to think we will our success into existence with our own hard work. And yet, so many of us knock wood, consult tarot cards and read horoscopes, or repeat affirmations to manifest our way to happiness. (TikTok, of course, has a term for it: “Lucky girl syndrome.”)

It feels like our fate often comes down to circumstance and coincidence, maybe even a bit of magic. But we have more power than we think to make ourselves luckier.

You can create your own serendipity, says Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at England’s University of Hertfordshire and author of a seminal book on luck. He and his team studied hundreds of people who considered themselves especially lucky or unlucky. The former tended to be cheery, optimistic, open and resilient. The latter had their metaphorical heads down, unable to spot and seize opportunities.

“When you are stressed and worried and anxious, you gain a kind of tunnel vision,” Wiseman says.

In one experiment, participants were told to count photographs in a newspaper. The self-described unlucky swept past half-page ads that revealed the answer to the task. Instead of quickly completing the assignment and collecting their cash prize, they just kept poring over the paper.

Change your mindset

Conjure a positive, expansive outlook by creating a “luck diary,” Wiseman says. Record a good thing that happened that day, or something bad from the past that’s not happening anymore. Since emotions are contagious, your good mood and sense of possibility can rub off on others, he says. Those people could make things happen for you: funding your idea, making an exception in your favor or connecting you with the love of your life.

Next, try eating a new food, watching a movie you wouldn’t normally watch or rearranging your furniture. You’re showing yourself that you’re a flexible person, Wiseman says. Unlucky people tend to see just one way forward. Lucky people set a goal but stay open to various ways of getting there.

The power of chance

Bad news for the try-hards: Intelligence and ability only get you so far. 

“Luck matters as much as talent,” says Alessio Emanuele Biondo, an associate professor at Italy’s University of Catania who researches economic policy.

In a 2018 paper, he and co-authors created a computer simulation where 1,000 people were exposed to 1,000 random events over a 40-year-career. Half of the events were positive, represented by green dots. Half were negative, symbolized by red dots. Each individual was assigned a different level of intelligence, ability and effort. 

The workers who reached the heights of success were hardly ever the ones with the most talent, the model found. Instead, the biggest winners had average talent but had been spurred by random luck, hitting more green dots. So many things beyond our control—where we’re born, our family wealth—can set the trajectory of our lives, Biondo notes.

Laura Knight says a little bit of serendipity helped her trading card game take off. PHOTO: LAURA KNIGHT

Laura Knight, a creative director who works in toy packaging, grew up the eldest child of a single immigrant mother. Obsessed with reaching financial stability, she said no to opportunities that felt too risky. There was the entrepreneur who invited her to join what turned out to be a wildly successful startup, the film-industry executive who promised her a screenwriting gig after high school. Looking back, she regrets all the chances she didn’t grab.

“I was scared,” says the 43-year-old, who lives in San Antonio. 

This summer, she got up the nerve to accomplish a longtime dream, launching her own mermaid-themed trading card game. She was shocked when orders immediately began pouring in. It turned out Netflix had premiered a show called “MerPeople” that coincided perfectly with her game. Taking a chance on herself had paid off.

Connect the dots

Serendipity is about connecting the dots between yourself and other people, says Christian Busch, an associate professor at the University of Southern California and author of the book, “The Serendipity Mindset.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How has chance changed your life? Join the conversation below.

Instead of introducing yourself with just your job when you meet a new person, throw out three information points that reveal your many facets, he recommends. You’re intrigued by black holes, planning a canoe trip and figuring out how to parent your two-year-old. The approach, which Busch calls the “hook strategy,” increases your chances of establishing a deep connection with someone, or unearthing a coincidence. 

If you’re nervous to talk to someone new or pitch an idea, Busch suggests asking yourself: What’s the worst that could happen if I don’t do it? 

The author, Rachel Feintzeig, and that guy she met at the hostel in Spain, on their wedding day in 2012. PHOTO: ELISABETH MILLAY

Should a hurdle pop up while you’re trying to make good on a goal, try flipping your thinking, he adds. Instead of seeing the issue as something destroying your plan, reframe it as a detour that becomes part of the plan. We’re often convinced things in our lives are terrible luck, only to realize later that the roadblock propelled us down a new, wonderful path.

Years ago, planning a budget trip to Europe, I was crestfallen to find that my dream beachfront hostel in Barcelona was fully booked. Annoyed, I snagged a spot at another place.

I was right: The new hostel wasn’t anything special. But in the common room, I started talking to a guy. It turned out we had both graduated from the same university a couple of weeks prior.

We are now happily married with two children. I still can’t believe my luck.

Critical thinking - University of Utah

 

Unlock your inner critical thinker

Sponsored: Sharpen your mind and give yourself a workplace edge with these tips from University of Utah experts.

(iStock | For University of Utah, sponsored) Good critical thinkers evaluate risk and use logic and evidence to make decisions.

https://www.sltrib.com/sponsored/2023/11/10/unlock-your-inner-critical-thinker/

By University of Utah

  | Nov. 10, 2023, 8:01 a.m.

There’s a reason critical thinking always pops up in lists of desired workplace traits. The ability to carefully assess, analyze, and reason through problems and information gives employees an edge in the workplace. Good critical thinkers evaluate risk and use logic and evidence to make decisions. They question processes and approaches and are more likely to come up with creative, innovative solutions. Employment experts say these “human” skills will only become more in demand as artificial intelligence takes up a bigger role in the workplace.

But here’s the twist: research shows critical thinking skills might be on the decline. In a 2022 survey, workers listed burnout, multitasking and frequent distractions as obstacles to deep, analytical thinking. And it’s not just the workplace—critical thinking isn’t taught consistently in schools, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The good news is, we can train ourselves to become better critical thinkers. “Becoming a strong critical thinker takes practice and an understanding of what the skills are,” says Madlyn Larson, associate director of education initiatives at the University of Utah’s Natural History Museum of Utah. Larson is project director for the development of Research Quest, a digital science education program that teaches middle schoolers across the country to become better analytical thinkers. Research Quest began out of a desire to equip kids for navigating a world where “fake news” is an everyday term. Students investigate real-world scientific mysteries designed to teach them specific skills: how to make strong observations and inferences, how to engage in analysis, and how to develop arguments based on evidence.

Another strong venue for developing critical thinking: the humanities. “Critical thinking is about approaching dilemmas as a human,” says Hollis Robbins, dean of the U College of Humanities. “Being human means interacting with and having dilemmas with other humans.” Robbins says literature, philosophy, social sciences, history, and other humanities disciplines give a window into human nature. In the classroom, students are challenged to engage in deeper thinking, question their own assumptions and take part in thoughtful discussions.

(iStock | For University of Utah, sponsored) Research shows critical thinking skills might be on the decline.

Some argue these “soft skills,” which have been practiced at universities for millennia, are less relevant in today’s world. Stephen Downes, a professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah, disagrees.

“Employers like people with an education in humanities for what they bring to the workplace, like the ability to pause and consider the situation,” he says.

Downes teaches a class called Reasoning and Rational Decision-Making, where he unravels methods throughout history to make sound judgments and predictions. By learning tools like statistics, students learn to spot logical fallacies in their own thinking. For example, when they stereotype someone, they’re employing a statistical generalization. “It’s the worst kind of statistical generalization—an inference on the basis of one,” he points out. “Once you understand this is what’s going on every time this happens, you start realizing, maybe I should stop and think first.”

Ready to hone your critical thinking skills? Here are some tips from U experts.

1. Question everything. Take any new information with a pinch of skepticism. Whether it’s a news article, a health claim, or data for a work report, ask yourself where it came from and what the source’s motivations might be. Cross-check your info with reputable sources like educational institutes, established news sites, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies.

2. Stay open-minded. When working on a problem and gathering information, don’t rush to conclusions. Keep your mind open until you’ve established a pattern of evidence.

3. Follow the clues. Take an objective look at what the evidence points to, and support your ideas with the strongest possible evidence. “Ask yourself, ‘How many ideas does my evidence support?’” says Larson. “One idea means the evidence is strong, while multiple ideas mean the evidence is weak.”

4. Embrace diverse perspectives. Stepping into someone else’s shoes can change your way of thinking. Attend talks, such as the Tanner Humanities Center lectures, to hear from people of different backgrounds.

5. Read literature. “The best works of literature have the richest dilemmas,” notes Robbins. “They give you the best lessons about how human beings behave and make decisions about other people.”

6. Get comfy with probability and statistics. “I can’t exaggerate how important it is to understand probability when it comes to decision-making,” says Downes. Don’t let the topic scare you off—there are many fun and accessible materials. Downes recommends How to Lie with Statistics, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, and the Freakonomics books and podcast.

7. Enroll in a humanities course. The University of Utah offers many classes to the general public as academic noncredit—the same courses college students take at a much lower cost. The best part? You can exercise your intellectual muscles without worrying about grades.

By University of Utah

Economics help

Useful website:

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/capitalism-v-socialism/

College indoctrination/brainwashing

 Interesting to compare the impact of a college major.

https://twitter.com/ntvll/status/1722482552932577630

Thomas Sowell on Social Justice Fallacies

I've added this book to my list to read. Sowell is always spot on.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thomas-sowell-on-the-trouble-with-social-justice-race-economics-black-white-disparities-finance-social-justice-7e2d4a3d?st=qya944lgwfktxxh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Excerpts with emphasis:

Thomas Sowell is best known for his insights on racial controversies, but race isn’t the main topic of most of his books in a career that spans more than six decades. Mr. Sowell, 93, is an economist who earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where his professors included Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other future Nobel laureates. His specialty is the history of ideas, and his most recent book, “Social Justice Fallacies,” harks back to his writings on social theory and intellectual history, which include “Knowledge and Decisions” (1980), “The Vision of the Anointed” (1996) and “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” (1999).

In his 1987 classic, “A Conflict of Visions,” Mr. Sowell attempted to explain what drives our centuries-old ideological disputes about freedom, justice, equality and power. The contrasting “visions” in the title referred to the implicit assumptions that guide a person’s thinking. On one side you have the “constrained” vision, which sees humanity as hopelessly flawed. This view is encapsulated in Edmund Burke’s declaration that “we cannot change the nature of things and of men—but must act upon them as best we can” and in Immanuel Kant’s assertion that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can ever be made.”

The opposite is the “unconstrained,” or utopian, view of the human condition. It’s the belief that there are no inherent limits to what mankind can accomplish, so trade-offs are unnecessary. World peace is achievable. Social problems such as poverty, crime and racism can be not merely managed but eliminated. Mr. Sowell begins “Social Justice Fallacies” with a quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision when he wrote of “the equality which nature established among men and the inequality which they have instituted among themselves.”

... In a phone interview, he describes the central fallacy of social-justice advocacy as “the assumption that disparities are strange, and that in the normal course of events we would expect people to be pretty much randomly distributed in various occupations, income levels, institutions and so forth.”

He says that’s an assumption based on hope rather than experience or hard evidence. “We can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history,” he writes in the book’s opening chapter on “equal chances fallacies.” He acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination exist and contributed to disparate outcomes. But he notes that “these vices are in fact among many influences that prevent different groups of people—whether classes, races or nations—from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms or other terms.”

For Mr. Sowell, the tremendous variety of geographic, cultural and demographic differences among groups makes anything approximating an even distribution of preferences, habits and skills close to impossible. The progressive left holds up as a norm a state the world has never seen, and regards as an anomaly something seen in societies all over the world and down through history. “There’s this sort of mysticism that disparities must show that someone’s done something wrong” to a lagging group, Mr. Sowell says. The social-justice vision “starts off by reducing the search for causation to a search for blame. And for so much of what happens, there is no blame.”

To illustrate the point, the book’s chapter on racial fallacies cites recent census data on poverty. “Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race—either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination,” Mr. Sowell writes. Liberals argue that higher black poverty rates are mainly a product of slavery, Jim Crow and of lingering “systemic racism.” Yet there are pockets of the U.S. populated almost exclusively by white people who experience no racism and who nevertheless earn significantly less than blacks.

The book cites Clay and Owsley counties in Appalachian Kentucky, places “that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.”

It’s been true for some time, Mr. Sowell says, that black behavioral patterns play a bigger role in racial disparities than racism does. Black married couples have had poverty rates in the single digits for more than a quarter-century. And black married couples “in which both husband and wife were college-educated earned slightly more than white married couples where both husband and wife were college-educated.” He adds that in a landmark 1899 study of blacks in Philadelphia, the race scholar W.E.B. Du Bois “said that if white people were to lose their prejudices overnight, it would make very little difference to most black people. He said some few would get better positions than they have right now, but for the mass it would be pretty much the same.”

Noting today’s black-white wealth disparities, authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi have advocated reparations in the name of social justice. So have such prominent organizations as the NAACP and Black Lives Matter. Mr. Sowell can’t take their arguments seriously. “The situation of slavery in some ways is much like the situation of conquered people,” he says. “There’s no question whatsoever that conquered people have been treated in a terrible way. Being conquered by the Romans was not a fate you would wish on anyone. But the fact is that the net result has been that those parts of Europe conquered by the Romans have been the most advanced parts of Europe for centuries.

“Similarly, when someone black says . . . ‘I’m worse off because of slavery,’ there’s no way in hell you can say that with a straight face. If you’re going to base reparations on the difference between where blacks today would be if it were not for slavery, then blacks would have to pay reparations to white people.”

Mr. Sowell is no stranger to poverty, prejudice or discrimination. He was born in segregated North Carolina in 1930, orphaned as a toddler and raised in Harlem from age 9. He never finished high school and earned his GED after serving a stint in the Marines during the Korean War. The GI bill enabled him to enroll in college, first at historically black Howard University, before moving on to Harvard, Columbia and finally the University of Chicago.

He says that whether social-justice proponents are pushing for slavery reparations or higher taxes on the rich, their real agenda is the confiscation and redistribution of wealth. ...

“That fallacy takes many forms, and taxation is a classic example.” The fallacy is assuming that “tax hikes and tax revenues automatically move in the same direction, when often they move in the opposite direction.” Liberals say, “ ‘We need more money, so we’ll make the wealthy pay their fair share,’ which is never defined, of course. But the wealthy are not just going to sit there and do nothing.”

A historical example is when “the British decided they would put a new tax on the American colonies. It turns out they not only didn’t get any more revenue, but they lost the tax revenue they had been getting.” In modern times, Mr. Sowell says, studies have shown repeatedly that people and businesses move their money to avoid high tax rates, and that includes migrating from states with higher levies to states with lower levies.

Although the social-justice vision isn’t new, Mr. Sowell observes that these ideas didn’t have much currency before the 20th century, in an era when intellectual elites mostly talked among themselves and reached a far smaller segment of the population. Mass communication changed that by greatly expanding their ability to shape public opinion and, by extension, government decisions: “One example was the period between the two world wars, when intellectuals managed to convince a lot of people that the way to avoid war was to avoid an arms race, and therefore that disarmament was the key to preserving peace.”

The growing influence and arrogance of the social-justice crowd bothers Mr. Sowell, which is one of the reasons he wrote the book. “Someone once said that people on the political left think that they would do what God would do if he were as well-informed as they are,” he says. He’s especially vexed by the quashing of dissent. “The fatal danger of our times today is a growing intolerance and suppression of opinions and evidence that differ from the prevailing ideologies that dominate institutions, ranging from the academic world to the corporate world, the media and government institutions,” he writes. “Many intellectuals with high accomplishments seem to assume that those accomplishments confer validity to their notions about a broad swath of issues ranging far beyond the scope of their accomplishments.”

Mr. Sowell’s own accomplishments cover a broad swath. He’s published more than 40 books, and “Social Justice Fallacies” is his sixth since he turned 80 in 2010. What recommends it is what recommends so many of the others: clear thinking, a straightforward prose style that combines wide learning with common sense, and an uncanny ability to take our preening elites down a notch.

Mr. Riley writes the Journal’s Upward Mobility column and is author of “Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.”

the magic of books

 The magic of books is that they snatch ideas and images out of the intellectual and spiritual air, out of personal memory and the traditions of peoples, out of the learning of centuries, the great human inventory—and codify them in written and printed language, as books to be held in the hands and absorbed in the mind.

...

Friends sorted through the dumpster books the other day and, out of that literate goo, rescued presentable editions of Shakespeare and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I salvaged a few myself. I like to think that when the world’s electricity winks out and all the screens are dark and dead and useless, perhaps those books that we rescued will be the only ones left on earth. A wandering tribe of survivors will come upon those precious things and (if anyone still knows how to read) will be astonished by the Highland romances of Sir Walter Scott. Or maybe, all unknowing, they’ll burn them to keep warm.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/requiem-for-a-dumpster-full-of-books-used-stories-new-york-7c4106cb?st=hngua6wlqxmrmya&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Also:

I was struck by Peggy Noonan’s observation that, through his work, “Tolstoy himself is still alive” and “continues in human consciousness.” (“My Summer With Leo Tolstoy,” Declarations, Sept. 2). David Foster Wallace once remarked that reading can be “an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can’t normally talk about.”

Tolstoy’s most memorable characters serve as conduits to the reader to explore that “stuff we can’t normally talk about.” That stuff includes life’s inevitable suffering—loneliness, death, grief—as well as the joys that only art and literature can seem to describe: friendship and love, new life, faith. Tolstoy’s writing is accessible and his fictional Russian 19th-century aristocrats are surprisingly relatable. Readers who haven’t yet done so should follow Ms. Noonan’s lead and give Tolstoy a shot.

Christopher J. Manley

Montclair, N.J.

Mark Andreessen on AI

A thorough, informed, and positive analysis:

https://a16z.com/2023/06/06/ai-will-save-the-world/

Why AI Will Save the World

by Marc Andreessen

Excerpt:

Why AI Can Make Everything We Care About Better

The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.

Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.

What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.

AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started – AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here – if we let it.

cliff inscription

When you really want to know something...

In 1835 Sir Henry Rawlinson, an officer in the East India Company and an expert in the Persian language, was assigned to a post in Iran and became interested in something known as the Behistun Inscription. Located in the Iranian desert, the inscription was a great deal of writing on a huge mountain of rock, much of which was inaccessible. It contains the same story in three different cuneiform script languages: Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. The story, in part an autobiography, is that of King Darius, who reigned in Persia around 500 BC.

The inscription is about 50 feet high and 80 feet wide, but it is located more than 300 feet off the ground on an almost sheer cliff.

click to enlarge

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