Microblog Memes

Some people are going to have far less resources to expose themselves to good luck that can actually benefit them in way that can change their outlook.

I agree completely. That is the part that is out of our control that I referenced.

Unfortunately, “luck” for most of us is how much money we have and the social standing that money offers to expose us to lucky situations.

I could agree or disagree with you on this depending on how we are defining things here. If a person comes from money and social standing, goes to ivy league school law school, and is offered a great job at a prestigious law firm right out of school I wouldn't call that luck, I'd call that systemic. I'd probably even say it was a forgone conclusion that someone in that situation got the job. The "lucky situation" here for this person wouldn't be getting the job, it would be born into money/society.

For any of the rest of us, crawling through law school to ending up in a chance meeting to get offered that same job, the job offer would be the "lucky situation".

Overall, I agree with your premise even if we put the definitions in different places.

it’s just that opportunities to improve one’s situation just don’t appear often enough to be taken advantage of correctly.

This goes to the heart of my main point. Each of us can positively affect the number of opportunities open to us that may be lucky with our own actions. You can't plan for luck, but you can learn all kinds of things which, in some strange way in the future, make you eligible to take advantage of a lucky opportunity.

I can give you an example from my own life. When I was younger I poor and trying to cram as much video onto a writeable CD. I dived into learning video compressions methods so I could be cheap and save on CDs, putting more on each. Years later I at an employer, the company has a problem because they need video sent from a rural location back to the main office for analysis by engineers in a very short amount of time and the rural local only had a very very slow satellite internet connection (this was way before Starlink existed). I saw what they problem was. The video files were too big for the slow connection. I asked if they were willing to take a massive hit to quality to get the video files transferred. They were happy to! I gather the software and wrote a solution that they could use at the rural site to compress the videos before transferring using almost identical approaches to my writable CD compression methods. I got promoted an a $10k raise because of it.

Had I not tried to be cheap on CDs, I would have not have learned nor been lucky enough to take advantage and get that promotion.