So, this is a post where my plan was to steal someone else's good idea. The thing here is, that years and years ago I read a really good essay on luck, probably online, but since then I had completely lost the source. I kept referring to the text from time to time by giving short descriptions, but I felt that it would be easier if I simply had a copy of the text. And since I couldn't find the original one, the way to go seemed to be to write the version I've been retelling all these years.

Now where this gets ironic is that once I wrote the version 1.0 of this post, I realized that instead of trying to google "apple orchard luck metaphor" variations, I could simply shove all of this to ChatGPT deep research. And lo and behold, the original source I was trying to find was most likely some report on Richard Wiseman's The Luck Factor, perhaps this one.

I'm not going to not-publish this post, mostly because it was fun to write and once more I got to ruminate on some thoughts on the topic. And it might be fun for others to read what can nowadays pass for a simple search query. But if the topic of luck interests you then Wiseman is what you should probably read.

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Is there luck?

Now, the theme of this essay is about luck. I want to start by stating three base things that are assumed to be true within the scope of this essay:

• Luck exists.
• Chance exists.
• Entitlement exists.

What these three things compbined say to me that there are many factors out there beyond our direct control. Some of them random (like whether or not you get hurt in a random traffic accident without personal fault) and others things like having a rich family that can support you mentally and financially. And some of these effects of these background things are called as "lucky events".

And yet. Instead of throwing my hands in the air, saying that lucky things are either by chance or illusions created by priviledges, I want to claim that there is something that you can actively do to improve your chances to be more lucky.

The apple orchard

Imagine that there is a magical apple orchard where the trees sprout new apples every night. You go visit this orchard every day, and try to find as many apples as you can. What makes this hard that there are a bazillion trees over hectares and hectares of land. Some trees tend to grow a lot of apples, some of them less. In this essay we look at two different strategies of acquiring apples in the long term.

Approach A

Every day you feel adventurous and go off to a new random direction. Sometimes you find a lot of apples, sometimes you go to sleep hungry. Life is a happy chaos.

Approach B

You start off by looking at random places, and once you find a tree that sprouts enough apples to support your threshold of enough apples, you just keep coming back to that tree every day. You might have gotten lucky in that the first tree you saw that was above your threshold was way above your threshold, but most likely¹ you'll be somewhat near your threshold.

Approach C

You follow Approach B at first, but you keep some fraction of days, e.g. a day a week or every other day safe for adventuring. You keep visiting the best tree found so far, but also keep up your exploring activities as well.²

Explore and Exploit

What I've described above is obviously (related to) the Explore-Exploit dilemma³. And finding the best balance in C is a very nontrivial problem. Especially in the real world where you can't know all the underlying probabilities, and the cost of e.g. exploration might change, or the exploitable resources might expire.

But skipping all that for now, I think that this is relevant for discussions about luck. I feel like there are many situations where we have a large collection of people using strategy B in some setting, and when they observe strategy A or C users getting more apples they think that they were "so lucky". There is naturally an observational bias here in play as well, since people tend to prefer to signal their wins more than their losses, and even with intermittent big wins by strategy A, strategy B is still mostl likely⁴ more profitable. But the real case is strategy C. Which, I argue, might then look like "just being lucky" to a strategy B user, even though there was an actual strategy difference involved.

Now, I want to emphasize here that I am not claiming that "everyone can be lucky if they just try", or that anyone can just lift themselve up from their luck-bootsraps. This is not the case. In reality, your signals will get mixed up with the noise from random events, priviledges and whatnot. And in many cases you simply cannot take the risk of not getting any apples one day. But I still do claim that there is some value available to those who make themselves available for the benefits that can occur from random occurrences.