How to squander all 4 kinds of luck

This morning I saw a post on Twitter that claims there are four kinds of luck:

1. Blind Luck
2. Luck from Motion
3. Luck from Awareness
4. Luck from Uniqueness

It goes on to say that you can't do much about blind luck, but you can increase the likelihood of the other three by deliberate actions: 

• by "creating motion and collisions through hustle and energy" (putting yourself out there and thereby increasing the likelihood of a lucky break); 
• by "depth of understanding within a given arena" ("Chance favors the prepared mind."); 
• and by "your unique set of attributes" (where your eccentric hobby leads you down by-ways that no-one else travels, so you see chances that no-one else sees).

And right away I started to wonder about my own life, and my own relationship with luck. I'm not sure I like what I see.

I have certainly had plenty of luck in my life. Mostly I have avoided it or run away hard in the other direction.

For example:

Back when I was in high school, I was a huge Tolkien nerd. (I know, I know … me and several million other kids the same age.) The summer before my Senior year, I joined a trip organized by my French teacher to go to Europe for eight weeks. It was a tremendous opportunity, and a lot of fun. I think this trip would count as "motion" in the sense above—breaking out of my routines to go to new and different places.

One day I was walking down the hallway of the hotel where we were staying while in Paris, and I saw an envelope that had fallen on the floor. There was no letter in it, and it was dirty and scuffed up. It looked like a piece of trash someone had carelessly dropped. But the name on the front plainly said "Baillie Tolkien" and it gave an address in the south of France. I didn't know it at the time, but Baillie Tolkien was the wife of J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher, the one who had edited The Silmarillion for publication and who made a subsequent career of editing all his father's other collected papers. In other words, I had stumbled quite by accident on Christopher Tolkien's mailing address.  

I picked up the envelope and kept it, but I never used the address. I couldn't think quite what I would say in a letter. I couldn't think how to use this lucky find. For indeed this was a clear example of Luck from Motion: I had put myself into a new place by joining this tour group, and I had stumbled on this address as a result. But I couldn't capitalize on it, because I stalled and didn't know what to do or how to move forward.

Or again:

I spent two years in graduate school without getting any kind of degree from it, before I dropped out to follow Wife home and begin a wholly non-academic life. My advisor was a man who had made a lot of enemies inside Academia over the course of his career; in one sense the program where he was when I enrolled was like a sanctuary where he was safe from the many scholars who were hostile to him. But he also knew everyone, both inside the Academy and outside. He brought speakers to campus who had prestigious positions in government, in national security, or (in one case) in the government of a foreign power. All of these speakers had been students on his at one time or another; all knew him and were well-disposed towards his current students. In retrospect, I'm sure that I could have asked him for an introduction to any of them, and then used that introduction to advance my career in one direction or another. (In the case of that member of a foreign government, it would have been a little wild for me to go there. The right person might have been able to work something out, however.) But I never did. It never even occurred to me. I was too focused on my day-to-day responsibilities: doing my reading, writing my papers, and navigating my new marriage to Wife. Even now, as I look back on it, I can see that I had tremendous opportunities for more Luck from Motion, but I can't imagine what exactly I might have done with it.

Or even:

That same graduate advisor I just mentioned? Once he organized a conference on campus with a number of scholarly dignitaries. One of the attendees turned out to be a woman who was the daughter of my advisor's mentor, back when he was a student. But she was also my mother's roommate during their respective freshman year in college. I'm sure I could have asked for an introduction, if only to say, "Hi, I'm the son of — —, your old college roommate." I'm sure she would have been amused and we would have chatted harmlessly for 90 seconds. ("Oh, did she finally marry that guy she was going around with?" "Yes." "How nice.") But of course I didn't do it. Somehow I was just petrified at the very idea. 

I'm certain that there have been more cases like these, if only I stop to think about them. In fact, I'm pretty sure there have been embarrassingly many. I don't know what they are right now, but partly that's because I don't want to think too hard about how many opportunities I have squandered. Also, in some cases I might never have noticed it in the first place.

Why have I squandered these opportunities? I think I can see a couple of reasons.

• I stall because I can't think how to move forward. This is what happened with the Tolkien address. I even recognized the event as a piece of phenomenal luck, but I had no idea what to do with it.
• My not-knowing-how-to-proceed is (in turn) at least partly because I don't know where I want to go. Longtime readers heard me complain for years about my seeming inability to formulate goals, by which I meant "career goals," before I finally reframed the issue in a way that made sense to me. Another aspect of the same phenomenon is that I don't seem to have a sense of smell for what I need, an instinct that guides me forward. Or if I do, I don't listen to it. I've written about this before, remarking that if I had been Albert Szent-Györgyi, I would have studied flatulence.
• And I'm pretty sure that sometimes I don't even recognize there was a possibility until years later. That's how I now see all those speakers my advisor brought to talk to our graduate program.

The behavior is so consistent that one cynical voice in my head starts to wonder if it is deliberate. Maybe the part of me that is so shy and so devoted to hiding is committed to ensuring that I never reach greatness, and so turns away from any opportunity that might look too promising.

Or maybe it's punishment for my sins. (See this post here and all the other posts linked from it as well.)

What a waste.

__________

Update, Tuesday 2024-05-28: Of course sometimes I actively run away from circumstances that would enable or encourage more luck. As I explained in my sixfold trivia post, way back in 2008: "When I was applying to colleges, I was accepted by Harvard but turned them down in favor of a tiny institution that nobody else at my high school had ever heard of." There is some kind of pattern here, and I think I need to take it seriously. Hiding, indeed.