Well, duh!
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There’s also “creating your own luck”, which is to say having a knack for stacking the deck in your favor one way or another, (which works both ways of course).
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Was going to post something like that but was lazy, thanks! 
And then there’s the fucking idiots…
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The universe may be indifferent, but if we can make it feel friendly toward us, then that’s practically the same. Which, incidentally, is all the occult really is—it’s interfacing with your unconscious in order to change your perception of the universe in ways that are more conducive to a desired outcome.
I once heard an anecdote where some doctor nixed research into some illicit drug being used for pain relief, arguing that the patients were still in pain…they just didn’t feel it.
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Sure there’s successful trash everywhere (like in the White House), but I was thinking of a band like The Jam that never made it in the US despite 18 consecutive Top 40 singles in the United Kingdom.
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I get the blech. I also know the way of the world, and as long as the risk of actions is limited by a family support of the deep pocket variety… go nuts! Hence the blech from the rest of us, unless a person can walk that line of risk without falling out to a shopping cart on street. Still… blech.
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That guy isn’t an idiot, he’s actually reasonably sharp. I had a reasonably hard time defeating him more than 50% of the time at wordfeud. That’s not the problem. He’s got an unjustifiably high opinion of himself for just being reasonably sharp, and a huge support network. He honestly thinks he’s a Genius. I’ve met actual geniuses, and they can be assholes, but they can back it up instead of just talking over you.
He’s taken all of his successes (and none of his failures) upon himself, and decided it’s because he’s a Maverick. And that just makes the guy an arrogant asshole, achievements be goddamned. I have a hard time getting my center-right friends to understand it, but the center-left friends totally do. If the USA were more Karaoke obsessed, I’d bet my 401k on which of those friends sing, “My Way” on Karaoke night.
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Or you can condition yourself towards cosmic indifference rather than the attachment of personal desires.
And then there’s the fucking idiots arrogant assholes…
Duly noted!
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Ideally that is the desired outcome—to effect a spiritual transformation whereby your ego isn’t constantly grasping at everything.
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So does this mean we can breed for luck? Will being lucky cause me to get involved in doomed missions of exploration?
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You have a strange definition of lucky there.
and so does larry niven
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Came to the comments, hit the search this topic button, typed in “Teela”, was not disappointed 
Just to add, Teela Brown might have been bred for luck, but she could be bad luck for those in her company if her survival chances were increased by their own decreasing 
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Hmmm, “… people who do poorly are more likely to do better the next time …” [2:46] Really? In a world where an event is reduced to your “ability” combined with a set of “chance events nobody can predict”, like flipping a coin, each iteration is an isolated event. Ergo, you are neither more nor less “likely to do better the next time”. For each event there is the same probability that you may or may not do better or worse than your “average”, irrespective of what the previous result was. And your “average” is only able to be determined after you have conducted X iterations, so you would not know the probability of doing better or worse on your next event until you gain enough data to be able to make a statistically significant claim about the ‘average’. And even then you may not have discovered your real ‘ability average’ it may be that you were measuring a set of outliers all along, and that you must repeat X more iterations before you can discover your actual ‘average ability’ and therefore the probability of doing better or worse against your average on the next iteration. Your true ‘average ability’ could be far worse that you realise or far better. But it could be that the “chance events nobody can predict” that are required for you to do ‘your best’ will never occur for you, and so, unluckily, you would never discover your true ‘average ability’. Or by that stage, maybe would you simply accept the conditions under which you have been performing iterations of the event as being as good as it gets and consider yourself lucky.
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“Born on third base…”
Beyond that it’s trivially obvious that one instance of luck will generally make it easier to absorb the next instance of bad luck or have the extra bandwidth to take better advantage of the next opportunity, and vice versa.
And of course people who suffer from strings of compounding bad luck don’t generally go around writing books patting themselves on the back about their great attitudes.
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They’re just looosers. Sad!
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But they do! Success is completely subjective to one’s goals. So part of a cultural race-to-the-bottom is the eagerness to re-frame would-be failure as “part of the plan.” That’s how in any culture, success is typically circle-jerk-by-fiat.
It is worth always remembering that prestige literally means deception, that this re-framing of luck is perceived as necessary trickery, upon others or even one’s self.
So YES, those who write books about themselves, who consider themselves the cultural elite, people of influence - are those who are most adept at fooling themselves and others that everything was their plan all along.
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