Luck is defined as, “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions” and we’ve all had our run ins with both good and bad luck. But if you’re reading this article, then clearly you’re looking for ways on how to get rid of bad luck and maybe even increase your good luck.
Lucky for you (pun intended) this article is going to cover why luck occurs and how to increase your chances of avoiding bad luck. But first, let’s start with an overview of luck.
What is Luck
Luck is tricky because it’s the chance of something happening. And we feel that chances are generally out of our control, which is a mostly true statement. But if that’s the case, then why do we tend to credit good luck to ourselves and bad luck to the universe or something else?
For example, when good luck befalls us, we tend to say, “Well that wasn’t luck, it happened because I did X, Y, and Z.” And when we hit some bad luck it’s always, “Ugh this always happens to me. I’m so unlucky.”
We tend to credit good luck to ourselves and blame the bad luck on others or the universe.
If that sounds at all familiar, you’re not alone. And you can probably think of a few examples where you’ve been lucky, either to your benefit or detriment. So let’s run with this concept of giving credit to luck, whether good or bad.
Bad Luck Car Accident Example
The next time something lucky happens, good or bad, think of the reasons why that happened. Often times it is driven by chance, but there are other underlying reasons as well. If you got into a car accident that was the other person’s fault, that’s unlucky. But what other events lead to the crash?
You might think of the following:
- The other driver is an idiot and doesn’t know how to drive
- That intersection is notoriously dangerous and crashes are common
- I was taking a drink and only had one hand on the wheel. The accident still wasn’t my fault, but maybe if I had 2 hands on the wheel I could have swerved to avoid it.
The first bullet point is crediting the bad luck to the universe and the other drive. “It wasn’t my fault, I’m just unlucky.”
But if you start to dive deeper into the second and third bullet points, you may find ways to decrease the chances of the accident (bad luck) occurring. Certainly, the accident is bad luck, but maybe you can stack the odds in your favor next time by avoiding that intersection or always having 2 hands on the wheel.
And with that idea in mind, let’s use that as a way to get rid of bad luck.
How to Get Rid of Bad Luck
As we just discussed, luck is the chance of something happening, either good or bad. And our day is made up of thousands of chances. So how do we increase our chances of good things happening and decrease our chances of bad things happening? Preparation.
Simply put, if we can prepare and anticipate situations, we can identify the actions that increase or decrease the odds of something happening.
There’s an old saying that luck favors the prepared. And that is one of the most accurate statements regarding luck. If you’re prepared for all situations, you’re likely to have good luck. But if you’re unprepared for the curve balls that life throws, you’re bound to hit bad luck.
So to get rid of bad luck, you need to be prepared. Let’s use another example of a common work situation to nail down this idea.
Example of Bad Luck at Work
Imagine you have a big presentation to give to your executive team at work. The request was to prepare 10 slides on how your team has been performing for Q1. That’s the entire request. How did your team do in Q1?
Now, you create the presentation all about Q1 performance. But you anticipate that the executive team may ask you what you’re going to do in Q2. That wasn’t in the original request and it may be going above and beyond or doing too much work for this presentation, but you think there’s a chance it could be asked. So you prepare a couple slides on future initiatives and throw them into the back of the deck.
Now, when you go to present, lo and behold an executive asks what you’re going to do in Q2. If you didn’t prepare the additional slides, you might be thinking, “Shit, they didn’t tell me to prepare anything to talk about Q2. What bad luck!”
But since you had the slides about Q2 initiatives, you can pull those up and you’re prepared to talk about that and answer the question from the executive.
The best way to avoid bad luck is to anticipate problems and prepare for them.
This is an example of how preparation and anticipation helped you avoid bad luck. Yes, it was bad luck the executive asked that question and not your fault. You prepared everything they asked for. But bad luck doesn’t care about that. Bad luck is just the chance of something awry happening. And it happened here.
How to Increase Good Luck
Now, if anticipating future problems and preparing for them is a way to get rid of bad luck, you may think that the opposite should stand true for good luck. And you’re right!
If you want to increase good luck, you have to think about good things that can happen to you and stack the odds in your favor by preparing for them.
Using the same work example, you might think you had a bit of good luck by having all the answers prepared for the executive’s questions, even if they didn’t give them to you beforehand. But it wasn’t luck at all, it was thorough preparation for all different scenarios.
Knowing this, we might think that luck isn’t chance at all. But it is still chance. The only difference is that now we’re stacking the odds in our favor that the chance will happen to be good instead of bad.
So keep this in mind when you want to increase your good luck. Make a list of what you would consider “good luck” and start thinking about ways to increase the odds of those things occurring. And there’s a good chance that you’ll start to see more good luck happening to you.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this article, luck was defined as the chance of something happening. And throughout, we’ve seen that luck is absolutely chance, but it doesn’t only have to be chance. And by that we mean that you can stack the odds in your favor of good luck happening and decrease the chances of bad luck happening.
At the end of the day, you can’t completely get rid of bad luck, but you can decrease the chances of it happening. And if nothing else, that’s a huge step in the right direction.
We can learn how to get rid of bad luck by anticipating future problems and preparing for them. It’s not an entirely easy task and generally involves going above and beyond the minimum required effort, but it is possible to decrease bad luck. And conversely, you can also use these same techniques to increase good luck.
We hope that this article has been helpful and you can start implementing these processes in your life today.
