By Serge Kreutz

What is luck?

No need to struggle for an answer.

By semantic logic, anything is defined as the opposite of its contrary.

Bad luck is easier to grasp than (good) luck.

As anybody will agree, much of bad luck is accidents. In a narrow sense, accidents are unexpected negative events that cause injury, or worse.

They happen by chance. We do not know when they happen, but it's a probabilistic certainty they will happen.

We cannot engineer good luck, as there are pitfalls similar to those in quantum mechanics.

We sure can engineer positive events. But as soon as we get involved with engineering occurrences, these occurrences may be positive, but they aren't luck anymore as they happen by design, not by chance.

It's a paradox just as in quantum mechanics where the fact that something is measured impacts on the results of measuring.

Let's try the approach from the top of this article. Luck, or good luck, is the opposite of bad luck. While we cannot engineer good luck, there are many avenues to reduce the frequency of bad luck, or at least the graveness of its impact.

The key here is precautions. In the course of our daily lives, and in a larger frame, we can take precautions for many imagined events that even may never occur.

But that doesn't matter. You take precautions because they could occur. Not because they will occur.

But sooner or later some event of bad luck will occur. In such a case, bad luck turns into good luck because your precautions reduce the graveness of the impact.

Example

The apartment building in which you have a unit on the 8th floor was set on fire in a terrorist attack. Many people die a terrible death. But because you are interested in survival theories, and thus consider a long rope a basic tool of being human, you just happened to have one on hand, so you were able to escape the burning tower.

For other residents, this was foul luck. But you remember it as a time when you were lucky indeed.

Another example

Guangzhou in Southern China has long had a reputation for the most skilled pickpockets in the world. You didn't know that, but it has long been a habit of yours to wear a small moneybelt under your shirt, as in fact many Chinese do. You always divide what you carry on you, small notes accessible from outside, big notes inside.

So, when you and other participants of your tour group were victimized by pickpockets during a Pearl River fireworks event, your friends lost all their travel funds, but for you it was just small change.

Here again, what would have been foul luck turned out to be good luck because you adhere to general precautions.

Be prepared for bad luck. That's as far as you can go doing something for good luck.