Yes, drawing to an inside straight and making it is an improbable event--but it is governed strictly by percentages. The event is not lucky or unlucky. The guy drawing it considers it good. He/she will probably draw the conclusion that it was a lucky event. Of course, the person holding 3 aces will consider it an unlucky event. In reality, it occurs with exactly the probability that random chance would dictate.
One way of looking at or defining lucky is that it is what you are when something both positive and very unlikely, happens with exactly the probability that random chance dictates it would happen, and it happens to you. If a million people take the chance, and its a one in a million thing, and your the one that it happens for, then you where lucky.
I do agree there is no such thing as luck, in the sense that someone who is "lucky" will have a lesser chance of bad things happen to them or a greater chance of good things happen to them. Its not an unconscious psychic or magical power that makes things work out well (or poorly in the case of "bad luck") for you.
To put in another way, I don't believe that people are lucky or unlucky, at least not in a way that has real meaning going forward. Probability would dictate that certain people will have an unusual amount of "lucky breaks" in their life, so that even if you look back at the end of their life, you could call them lucky, but that's just random possibility combined with the fact that there are over 6 billion people in the world.
Well some people do "make their own luck", they make the right decisions and have the right attitude, that helps create good things in their life, even things that don't seem to be the direct result of their decisions. But that's not really luck by any normal definition of the term. |
