I bow before your awesomeness and hope to be just like you when I grow up! 
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David Brin has a short story about an infectious altruism virus.
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Is it look at lots of them? I found one once. I think I used up all my luck in finding one.
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I once stood in a patch of clover and started to find four-leaf clovers one after the other. Every time I looked down, there was another one, and this continued until I finally got bored of it.
Of course, just like rabbits and their feet, the four-leaf mutation doesn’t seem to be very lucky for the clover itself…
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In entertainment, though you could apply it to other fields, there’s quite a few talented that just never really catch a break. Success is definitely a complicated mix of busting your ass, being able to present yourself in a way that’s an easy sell, knowing the right people, but there’s also just luck. Things just come down to timing instead of talent.
I don’t necessarily believe that luck is a thing, but some people seem to have some pretty wild breaks.
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[quote=“gellfex, post:23, topic:97388”]David Brin has a short story about an infectious altruism virus.[/quote]“The Giving Plague”. Since it’s short, it looks like you can read the whole thing in the Amazon.com preview of “Otherness”.
https://www.amazon.com/Otherness-David-Brin-ebook/dp/B00YQFDAIO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490032825&sr=8-1&keywords=otherness#reader_B00YQFDAIO
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I think this is true in many fields it just is really obvious in entertainment to anyone who has seen local theater production acting as good as any in movies or Broadway. Granted the local theater here close to New York City benefits from all of the less successful actors saturating this market, but that just proves the point too.
Another place to see this is all of the British bands that hit number one there but never broke through in the US market.
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Yesterday was a very good day as I saw Jules Feiffer, got a chance to thank him for his work, and talk with him about his latest book, Cousin Joseph, which is great (hint, hint). It was at an event for Ed Sorel, another great graphic artist.
When I mentioned it to my friends online, one wrote back that I was lucky. I objected, writing that I’d found this event because I look for such opportunities, made note of it, and then went. It was all active decision-making, nothing to do with luck.
But yes, I am lucky in attitude in that I look for such things, notice them when I find them, and then act on that information. Luck paired with determination.
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It’s definitely about putting yourself out there to experience things. And my personal outlook on it is even a bad day or event makes for a good story to tell afterward. As cynical as i am i’m relentlessly optimistic about most things and i think it’s served me well 
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I resemble that remark.
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lucky star! 
I’m a healthy white male born into an era of peace and prosperity. I attribute it all to hard work.
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• Maximize chance opportunities
• Listen to lucky hunches
• Turn bad luck into good
• Expect good things to happen
A good friend of mine (currently also my tenant) called me a lucky duck for landing my current gig. He’s not wrong, but while it was a stroke of random luck that I got connected to the gig and ended up with a boss who was a huge advocate of mine, I really put my nose to the grindstone for a few years, and did a lot of things that when opportunity knocked, I was well prepared to open the door and say, “I’m your guy”. This is mostly item 1. Thinking about some of the least lucky people I know, some people just really have shit luck. There’s no preparing for everyone in your family having a debilitating or fatal disease.
Item 2, I do believe in intuition as a way your subconscious mind lets you know it’s figured out a possibility. I also think it can get things wrong, and some people’s intuition is better than other people’s, and of course some people are better than others at listening.
The next 2 items are purely attitude, being open to opportunity coming from angles you wouldn’t necessarily expect, recognizing it and taking action. No magic needed here either.
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Don’t tell Oxalis. They won’t like your train of thought.
Not sure that’s entirely true, case in point:
Then there’s Teela Brown from Niven’s Ringworld.
I think there’s a flip side: people who feel they’ve had success purely through “sheer determination and hard work,” but had a lot of luck too (meeting the right people at the right time, having the right parents, etc.). Covers a spectrum from success despite the odds to zero talent but lots of luck.
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I know a guy like this. Very wealthy parents, had the luxury to flunk out of college 3 times, and then get a pretty good entry level sales position in the insurance biz (guess what biz his parents work in?).
Since I have known the guy, he always has acted as if he was undeniably smarter and better than everyone else. Of course staunch Libertarian these days (although still an apologist for just about every right wing cause), and 100% believes that he earned everything he has in life, and never had anything handed to him.
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It’s bad luck to be superstitious.
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It’s a literal confidence game. First, they remember all the times things worked for them and edit out or reframe the ones that didn’t and say: I am lucky. Then, they approach future events with more confidence – they’re not worried, because they’re lucky and it’ll be fine. Turns out that a lot of people act positively towards that kind of confidence. Combine that with the fact that the “lucky” person is putting themselves forward for opportunities that less confident (sometimes just because they think that luck isn’t a factor) people turn down and it really can seem like good things happen to them more often.
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