Do you feel lucky? Were you lucky to enter the early childhood education industry when you did? Are you lucky to be working in the ECE centre, where you are now? Whether or not you consider yourself lucky can have a huge impact on your attitude to both your personal and professional life. Rightly or wrongly, ‘lucky’ people are generally considered to be happier, more confident, and more successful than other people. As an inherently vague and illdefinable quality, luck (or the lack of it) can be a comforting excuse for many things that happen to us. Interestingly, your view of what luck actually is, can be a good indicator of your attitude to life. Our relationship with luck can be quite complex. Otherwise rational people may be tempted to follow a hunch, ‘take a punt’, back a favourite sports team, or ‘indulge in an occasional flutter’. Most of the time, this sort of activity is quite harmless, and represents a bit of fun, or an opportunity for social engagement. Often, we think of luck as a purely random occurrence. Some lucky person will win the division one lotto prize, and become an overnight millionaire. If we buy a raffle ticket, then we would like to think that we have as much ‘chance’ of winning as the next person, Graduating from the School of Luck By Phil Sales and statistically that might be the case, if all other things are equal. However, if our objective is winning the big prize then, statistically-speaking, we are far more likely to be one of the many ‘unlucky’ people who miss out. Somewhat ironically, we can have the same chance as everyone else of being lucky, while also having an almost absolute certainty of being unlucky, all at the same time! One response to the dilemma of randomluck is to try to tip the balance in our favour. A heavier investment in raffle tickets, or following a ‘hot tip’ on a horse, are both semi-rational attempts to shift the odds towards us. Other attempts to manage and control luck include the use of rituals. Humans (like other living creatures) are talented patternrecognition machines, and a short run of good luck can appear to validate the actions which preceded it, such as a prayer, a system, a charm, or something similar. Sadly, many of these strategies are based on December 2022 { 26 }
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