YOU CREATE YOUR OWN LUCK

Often people ask me about the role of luck in success.They are convinced that luck is a critical factor in achieving anything worthwhile. They feel that some people are just lucky and some are not. They talk about luck as if it were a matter of fate or destiny, largely inexplicable. They insist that a person gets to the top of his field largely as the result of getting lucky breaks, which they, of course, did not get. 

       I have studied the concept of luck for many years. My conclusion is that luck is a word that people use to explain away things that turn out much better than could have been expected. If a person achieves great financial success at a young age, people say he was ''just lucky.'' 

       Some people use luck to describe something remarkably good that happens that is out of the ordinary. But it is not luck at all.The fact is that all so-called lucky outcomes are really the result of probabilities. There is no such thing as luck. 

       The Law of Probabilities says that there is a probability for everything that happens. These probabilities can often be determined with considerable accuracy. The entire insurance and underwriting industry is based on probabilities, which are expressed in actuarial tables.