Do you feel lucky ?

Nowadays I'm just thinking about 'luck' and how others perceive it. The diversity of general thought is just intriguing to me and so I found some views on 'luck'. Most of the people who believe in luck as being kind of an inherited trait or a trait which has a maxima and minima depending on time or surrounding are either gamblers or religious people . Some people don’t believe in the concept of luck and just accept all things as coincidences, which to my thought is a good way of thinking and accepting life. But I wonder how a person born in the slums perceives luck? I can understand that he would believe strongly in either luck or God for his misfortune. For them, just to have a decent answer of life would be one of those two, it is sad, but I guess it satisfies them.

I was writing a different post on making aware decisions and also not to long ago I was talking to a close friend of mine whose ideology of luck is just very satisfying to me. He defines luck as a good outcome of a unconscious decisions. This sentence defines certain ways of life, I feel. It is not possible to control all your unconscious decisions as you never know what may happen, but you have probability with you. I feel, me as well as the general public does things whose consequences we cant fully be aware of before it actually happens. When you work your job or do your periodic errands, it’s a conscious decision whose outcomes you are aware of, you are also aware of the outcomes if you fail to do those work. Life is as simple as that but you just need to think and analysis situations which need attention, this means you have to decide which things require your attention. The devil is in the details. So to explain this concept of unaware decision making I'll give a small personal example. Most people who travel international  would know about the harrowing process of immigration. Long queues and answering questions to officers with sad smirks on their faces. Especially at New Delhi airport, sometimes there is a queue comprising of passengers from 4 international flights simultaneously. So once when I travelled to Germany with my dad, on the flight back he had booked two aisle seats opposite  to each other, 2nd row behind the first class compartment. He did not put anything in the overhead compartment, just a briefcase under the seat. Before the plane landed, he told me to keep up with him in a tone which resembled the tone of a man telling me you're on your own. The plane landed and as soon as the seatbelt sign turned off, he vanished. I have not seen any man walk so fast, than my dad trying to get the first spot on the immigration line. Surprisingly it worked well for us. He got through on the 3rd number cause the first class people de-board first or there is no way they could have beat him. I came at, a fair guess would be near 23rd, but the best thing was that 3 flights landed with us and the immigration was packed behind us.

This just shows that in this particular case my dad is completely aware of his decision making, he's aware that he doesn't know if the queues are already going to be full. Also he knows that it's not under his control to make flights land, so being so fully aware of the situation he gets the best possible out come. Instead of majority of public who would, in the example above, probably quote,"  its just bad luck that 3 planes landed together, now we cant do anything but wait just for immigration". We should know what we are doing, know what we are eating, analysis the world we see around us not because it’s a way of life I'm promoting, but because in my experience smart, conscious and aware decisions bring good luck.           

This is special mention for a good friend of mine who believes in "luck", mystically. She took a deck of cards, shuffled it, split it in half and gave one half to me. We both would keep a card face up simultaneously and who ever got the higher card kept both the cards and the winner be the one with all the cards. It’s a very long game to finish but she did point out that I was getting a higher card more number of times than her and hence I am momentarily, mystically, more lucky. To which I argued that the cards are based on probability and over a thousand games the average outcome would be equal to result can derived by probability theory. She eventually told me its not possible to calculate such random probability and I argued you can. I tried, failed miserably. So here is a shout out to whoever is interested in doing some probability.