Luck

What is luck?

Is it just the coming together of the universe around you to create a situation you want?

Does it happen due to God keeping an eye out? Is it magic of the mind?

I do not know if I believe in God. I believe that there is a greater force in the world which I call God but I have also think that this force can be called Luck. Luck is just coincidence of the universe where all things go my way a particular day. But I can also say that God is keeping an eye on me and has decided to favor me that day?

My belief that Luck is the greater force in the universe stems from many things. Consider my being born. I am lucky that I reached first and was born. I am lucky that humans exist. I am lucky that life exists. I am lucky that Earth has hospitable conditions. If luck did not affect my being born, was it inevitable that since everything else exists I would be born? If it was inevitable then you could also make the argument that my life is pre-decided and all the choices i am going to make have been already made for me. I do not want to believe that. It makes me feel so powerless and I feel like it is not healthy to think that. If I say that whatever I do it is already decided then I could be demotivated to try new things, I could give up on life and say let life happen to me. I could also think that it is already decided that I will not fail and could get overconfident with initial victories and not prepare for the future. I could also go very far in life if I assume it is written that I will succeed. But assuming this, I feel is dangerous. Who knows how far I will go or even what success is.

I am not going to believe that my life is decided. I will always roll the dice knowing the probability of me getting a 6 is 0.167 and If I get it 5 times then the force is with me. I want to always try my best knowing I can fail but giving up at that point is never an option. Preparing for all failure cases actually helps anytime. Because if it is successful you believe luck was with you and you go to your next opportunity with a smile. Even if it fails and you catch it in your back up plan you know that you had planned and it worked.

Another motivation but maybe unrelated is the importance of trying till you get it. I was thinking about how Machine Learning works and it too depends on luck but even if it is far away from the solution, the machine gets to the solution after many tries. If a non thinking item can get success after many tries then I can definitely improve too.

This was just inspired by my musings about luck and God. I do not know if they are the same or not but sometimes it feels like if both go your way, you feel very happy and that happiness is what we chase at the end of the day.