Quotes About Luck

Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn't trainable or that you're not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.

In that narrative, taking credit for something good is the same as saying we made the right decision. And being right feels good. Likewise, thinking that something bad was our fault means we made a wrong decision, and being wrong feels bad. When our self-image is at stake, we treat our fielding decisions as 100% or 0%: right versus wrong, skill versus luck, our responsibility versus outside our control. There are no shades of grey.

The way our lives turn out is the result of two things: the influence of skill and the influence of luck.

When we field our outcomes as the future unfolds, we always run into this problem: the way things turn out could be the result of our decisions, luck, or some combination of the two.

At one such tournament, I told the audience that one player would win 76% of the time and the other would win 24% of the time. I dealt the remaining cards, the last of which turned the 24% hand into the winner. Amid the cheers and groans, someone in the audience called out, "Annie, you were wrong!" In the same spirit that he said it, I explained that I wasn't. "I said that would happen 24% of the time. That's not zero. You got to see part of the 24%!

Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.

Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

When we think probabilistically, we are less likely to use adverse results alone as proof that we made a decision error, because we recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but luck and/ or incomplete information (and a sample size of one) intervened.

When you overfit decision quality to outcome quality, you risk repeating decision errors that, thanks to luck, preceded a good outcome. You may also avoid repeating good decisions that, because of luck, didn't work out.

When it comes to the bad stuff, the inside view tends to lead you to blame luck rather than your own decision-making. After all, luck is the easiest escape hatch for keeping your self-narrative intact. But identifying luck as the primary culprit for your situation won't help you much in addressing the situation.

A negative outcome could be a signal to go in and examine our decision-making. That outcome could also be due to bad luck, unrelated to our decision, in which case treating that outcome as a signal to change future decisions would be a mistake.

our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.

Small changes in how much you notice the luck that you would otherwise overlook will have a big influence on the way your life turns out. Those small changes act like compounding interest that pays big dividends on your future decision-making.

there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.

You can't tell that much about the quality of a decision from a single outcome, because of luck. When you make a decision, you can rarely guarantee a good outcome (or a bad one). Instead, the goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.

I thought that all men existed just so they could have accidents, drink too much, and die. I thought that I was lucky to be a girl.

If you aim to leave Las Vegas with a small fortune, go there with a large one.

Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by an occasional miracle

For me, it took five years to understand what professionalism meant. But I'm more settled now. I'm married, life changes, and I've been lucky in managing my injuries.

Certain people get an opportunity because they happen to be in the right place at the right time. It has no bearing on their talent. I don't think we should look at it and feel bitter about it. That's the way the cookie crumbles in all professions.

Have you ever heard of the book 'Freakonomics?' So there's these two economics professors, and they're really interesting guys, and they wrote these books. And it's really all about sort of false thinking. They try to go in and look at a number of different phenomenon.