Lucky Thread

Luck is just one of many terms used to describe someone accomplishing something that is statically unlikely. Saying someone was lucky does diminish the task if it is a mischaracterization of an event. I think there is a both a place for luck and hard work. If I role dice six times and get snake eyes all six times is that skill or luck? Luck. Is Jeff Gordon winning lots of Nascar races luck? Nope. The are many events that happen that are unplanned, like meeting your significant other. Is that luck or fate or skill?

 

Luck is an event outside of your control, which is affecting you in a positive sense. Unluck is the same but in a negative sense.
Ex: you are in a car race and be in the 2nd position short in front of the finishing line. Now the leader suddenly have an engine failure which allows you to win the race. That is luck for you and his unluck.

 

So just a matter of wrong time, wrong place, wrong person.....!!

 

Or your team's better car maintenance.

 

Yeah. But even then it is out of the drivers direct control.
Your luck can be adjusted in your sense or not.

Luck, unluck or fate can have sometime quite big and/or strange effects (positive or negative) on you. I as a quite extreme example survived a train accident because my computer failed to work one day before the accident. The breakdown of my PC send me in the computer store to get a replacement part instead of riding the train which had then the accident. My plan was to ride that train if the computer did not failed and I would had then sitting in the train wagon which got destroyed in the accident. About 9 people got killed in that wagon. A note at last: the failing part of the computer was working fine again later.

 

Yeah. But it saved my life.

The SCSI controller was suddenly failing and did not even work with another HDD. Therefore I left to go to the computer store to get a new one. As I was standing in the store, there were many fireguards, ambulances, polices and more rescue teams passing the store. At the evening news on the TV I heard, what happened. The day after I realized that I would have been sitting in that damaged wagon if the computer did not have failed.

 

So pleased you were not on that train. The interesting thing about fate is that being help up by a stop light can result in avoiding an accident in the near future OR put us directly into an accident we would otherwise have avoided. Those accidents may have happened anyway (and we just were not there at that precise time) or may have been the direct result of our vehicle being there at that precise moment, not 1 second sooner or 1 second later.

The story of 'The day the music died' involving Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and 'The Big Bopper' is of two musicians (Valens and Bopper) being lucky or unlucky based on having flu and on a coin toss.