Podcast - Episode 0188 - Does Luck Favor The Prepared?

In this episode Joel and Antonia talk about the common belief about luck favoring the prepared.

In this podcast you’ll find:

• In our last podcast, we discussed how nothing happens by cause and effect. Everything is the emergent of a system.
• If everything is an emergent, how do we have any control over our lives?
• There’s a significant node many refer to as luck. Is there any way to influence luck?
• Luck favors the prepared.
• There are ways to be more responsive when situations present themselves.
• Lucky or unlucky gives the idea of an external locus of control.
• “Luck favors the prepared” indicates some power.
• Some people seem to have luck over and over again, whereas other people can’t seem to catch a break.
• Is that the nature of the universe? Are there some people that are lucky and others that are just unlucky?
• Luck also appears to favor the advantaged.
• Initial conditions are fundamental in systems thinking.
• If you are born in a part of the world that has extremely high infant mortality, your initial conditions are pretty significant. It has nothing to do with you and everything to do with where you were born.
• Others were born into families that set up profitable conditions for them.
• For those who are not advantaged, preparation becomes very important.
• We have no idea whether or not some people have more luck than others.
• Some people are more driven to want to improve their conditions. Others are more motivated to maintain homeostasis. And still others may seem to be on a self-destructive path.
• You don’t have to be massively advantaged to listen to this podcast, but you have a lot more advantage than anybody else has had in history.
• Humans don’t measure themselves objectively. We measure ourselves in comparison to other people.
• We are talking about fundamental advantage, not privilege.
• We only experience contrasts. Like with temperature, in the spring 65 degrees feels warm. In the summer the same temp seems cold.
• As a human, we are not in the food chain. That’s an advantage.
• We have self-awareness.
• We can understand time and tools.
• There are advantages all of us have that other people don’t have.
• It is really easy for us to assume we are the disadvantaged ones. Open your mind and see that there are people out there that have more disadvantages than we do.
• We are often blind to most of the advantages we have as individuals.
• We experience our disadvantages, so they become very apparent to us.
• Our disadvantages are obvious to us.
• Our advantages aren’t as obvious.
• Don’t deny your advantages to help the disadvantaged.
• Don’t demonize other people’s advantages as unfair.
• Putting ourselves at a disadvantage prevents us from using our advantages to make a change.
• Embrace the advantages you have and attune them to elevate the collective.
• If you have an advantage, take advantage of it and prepare yourself.
• Making yourself disadvantaged to honor others of disadvantage doesn’t help those people become advantaged.
• Use your advantage to help others become advantaged.
• You haven’t solved anything by forcing yourself into a disadvantaged spot.
• We aren’t meeting disadvantaged people at their level because we have nets they have never had.
• What we could do thru hard work is utilize the time that has been created by advantageous technologies and solve the problems that create more advantages for others.
• The more we focus on our disadvantages, the more time we spend focusing on ourselves and not helping anyone.
• Become problem solvers not just sympathizers.
• We equate advantage with lack of problems and challenges.
• People with money have hardships.
• Be very thoughtful with how you engage with the word ‘advantage.’
• These are systems running. It is not cause-and-effect. The belief that people who are rich or beautiful are always happy is one to one correlation.
• Some wealthy people are ecstatically happy, and some wealthy people are miserably unhappy.
• Individuals who are stuck in safety and security in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs are in a frustrating situation.
• So anybody not struggling with basic needs appears to be having an easy life. But each level has its challenges.
• Some people in Maslow’s level of Love and Belongingness may believe beautiful people have all the love they need.
• Safety and security are beyond money as a resource. Rich people may feel unsafe that someone is going to kill them for their money.
• Luck favors the empowered.
• Not everyone is empowered – rich or poor.
• Figure out which nodes of your system you have influence over.
• Don’t sweat the stuff you have no control over.
• When luck or unluck comes into your life, it doesn’t matter because you have full and total empowerment over the nodes of your life that you have influence over.
• “I make my own luck.”
• When you look at systems, one of the biggest nodes is time. We can’t control it.
• When it comes to being empowered and creating the system required to get the emergent you want, time is always a part of that.
• Empowerment happens in stages.
• Empowerment may be THE end game.
• Empowerment may come from letting all the dialogue and narrative go.
• All the things that are unhealthy for us.
• Empowerment happens slowly over time. In stages.
• Even if you’re not happy every second of every day you have the power to do something about it.
• You aren’t a victim.
• You have a say over how you feel and what you will do to make yourself feel better.
• A lot of the models we teach are tools to help you realize you have the ability to be empowered.
• You have control over how you feel and think.
• Sometimes the ways we are disadvantaged incentivizes us to work harder and build skills other people didn’t have to build.
• Focus on the ways you are advantaged.
• Focus on the ways you have power and control and cut yourself some slack if it is taking time to reach the destination you have in mind.